CN Central: Can you increase the minimum number of pages needed to allow spine text to be printed on covers?

John Haines

Page ranger: +99

23 Feb 18:15

Hello, folks,

This is not a complaint, but more suggestions for the future.

My book arrived today, the overall quality is excellent, the image replication is the best I’ve seen yet, the paper, text, and binding are all A1 Plus. But it has no spine text. However, I did fully know it would have no spine text before I ordered, but despite this, I’d like to mention a few things.

I know all printers are different with different processes and thus different limits, ranges etc in relation to certain aspects of the processes. But to my mind, my book is, at 104 pages, thick enough to take spine text. I have printed similar books before on two other sites, and both had a minimum requirement of 76 pages before guaranteeing spine text would print. So could there be some sort of adjustment made to allow spine text at a lower page count than is currently the case on here?

The following part of this question has been transferred to another question If I Upload My Own PDF Cover Instead Of Using The Cover Creator, Why Do I Have To Save As PDF/X-1a:2001?
Secondly, and this is how I arrived at having to create a book without spine text. I created a PDF of the cover at the correct size, published the book, ordered, then was informed that the cover file could not be printed. I revised, then noticed I was being prompted to create a PDF with the extension x2001 ( or something like that,, fuzzy now. This is something I could not do, and nor it seems can many other self publishers, although this was on other sites as I trawled the internet for answers. Can I again, politely of course, point out that there are no such requirements on most of the other major sites? There are requirements to flatten images, that’s standard, but as long as the file is a PDF, then that suffices.

The following part of this question has been transferred to another question Why Is The Image That I Uploaded To The Spine Area In The Cover Creator Not Displaying Properly?.
Ok, moving on, I swapped to the site cover creator, but the spine area provided did not match the file at all. I imported the spine file, but only a fraction showed. I did save the file at the dimensions stated, and at 300 DPI. My (wild) guess is, the site for some reason has the spine option geared for uploads at far less than 300, thus when a file is loaded at 300, it goes hogwild and doesn’t constrain itself in the given area. I know this is guesswork by the way, but the upshot was, my correctly sized spine, dimension wise, didn’t fit even though it should have done.
I know it sounds like a beef, it’s not, but I do think the process could be tweaked re PDF types for covers, and the spine area if using the site’s cover creator.