Book Publishing and Sales
ARose Books is currently a wholesale company. All of our products, whether books or cards and gifts created from vintage postcards, are sold through other retail websites and stores. We do not currently sell our own products from our website, but direct users to the sites in which they can purchase our items.
In publishing books, we use the printer, Lightning Source, and distributor, Ingram Book Groups. Using these two companies gives our books international exposure to website and regular bookstores, as well as libraries. Lightning Source and Ingram have just made all of their 1,000,000 titles (including ARose Books titles) available to the new Espresso Book Machine with international locations.
Espresso Book Machine
All of ARose Books titles are now available for purchase from one of the new Espresso Book Machines located throughout the world. These ATM machines for books will allow you to walk right up, select a book, and have it printed, bound, and delivered to you right there at the machine.
If you would like to try the new Espresso Book Machine, you can find the current locations from OnDemandBooks.
When ARose Books was first started in 2002, it was immediately setup as a “print-on-demand” publishing house. This means that as a book is ordered by an end user, a book is printed. The printing fees are charged per book at the time of print.
This was quite new in 2002, as the original method of printing books for hundreds of years had been to order “runs” of books, a minimum of 500 or 1000 per run. The publisher paid this cost up front and then recouped it over time as books were sold.
Print-on-demand technology allowed new, small publishers or self-publishing authors to get started with minimal upfront cost. In the last ten years the publishing industry has gone from 5 major publishing houses to over 100,000 small publishers in the United States alone. This is becoming the standard for printing technology.
With the emergence of digital books as Mobipocket, Kindle, or Sony eBooks, publishing took another form. Now anyone can upload a book to these providers and sell books online. This has resulted in authors being able to self-publish easily and many small companies are quickly uploading books as fast as possible to get sales from the retails websites.
If you are interested in self-publishing, or becoming a publisher, please follow this link to Lightning Source and read their Products and Services links at the top of the page.
ARose Books Quality
All of our printed books go through many edits by various people. We order proofs and preview the books before releasing them to the public. If a book does not meet with our approval, we redo it, resubmit it, and order another proof until we are satisfied. In this way, we hope to provide you with the best possible finished product for each book that we publish and a book that will be treasured and enjoyed.
A study of competing titles shows that often the quality of books, as prepared for these digital retail sites, is not what a printed book would be. The Gutenberg Project, which is attempting to put all public domain books online for readers to read at no cost, also allows anyone to download and redistribute their eBooks. The Gutenberg eBooks are often text only or simple HTML versions of the book with little or no formatting. Some have images, but there is not much work done on image preparation or restoration. This is a free service and their goal is to provide as many books as possible to the public for free reading, not neccessarily to provide well formatted books that are keepsakes.
Many of the books that you find on Kindle, Mobipocket, and Sony are mere copies of Gutenberg work. At ARose Books, this is not the case. All of our books have been created as a craft with the story in mind – choosing fonts that give a feeling for the story being told and designing covers to match the mood and happenings within the book. Many of our books have custom illustrations and when using old images, we carefully restore them to the best quality provided by the printer. Finally, we edit and edit to provide the best final result as a book that we are proud to provide to the reading public. We take this same care with electronic books such as Kindle books.
Each of the digital book providers uses a different format with various features allowed. We tailor each of our books to take advantage of the digital features available within that format and attempt to present the digital book as closely as possible to the printed version.
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