book of Vaadin on Lulu: please use bigger print size !

[Jorg2 (Jorg Heymans)]

Hi,

I ordered the book through Lulu last week, and when i got it in the mail i was really disappointed. The printed version basically is about the size of a hotel bible, this is way too small to read comfortably so it went straight to the paper bin - what a waste of paper

I somehow missed the only user rating on Hulu, it said this :

love the ‘Book of Vaadin’ online as HTML and as a PDF. But I wanted something I could carry around, read in bed and mark up. This review is about the printed product. The book which Lulu.com prints is very small 4.25 x 6.75 inches (10.5 x 17.5 cm) that the print becomes small small and the binding so tight that it is not useable. Note the Product Details under Size – POCKET! this needs to be twice the dimension in order to be useful. DO NOT BUY this book until Lulu.com offers a larger format. Download the PDF and use FEDEX/Kinko’s to create a something useable.

Any plans to offer a larger print somewhere ?

Thanks
Jorg

[Marko1 (Marko Grönroos)]

Hi,

The pocket book size shouldn’t be too bad, as such, for reading in bed, as most novels in the past century have been published in the same format. You can find the format in some other popular manuals as well, including
some
O’Reilly books.

Another reason for the size is that we have given the book out for free at meet-ups and conferences. The Lulu book is actually sold for cost price - the price is the on-demand printing and shipping cost (batch prints are much cheaper).

Small is also beautiful. And fits in your pocket.

Nevertheless, the customer is always right in this sort of issues and as a sight-limited person myself, I understand that the size could be a practical problem. The font is much smaller than in most novels. Making the font bigger with the same book size would create some problems, such as making the book much thicker and formatting the code examples nicely would become even harder.

Making the book’s PDF available in yet another format is possible. It would require some work to make the Docbook configuration. You could create a ticket, get some suggestions for a nicer size, and perhaps we’ll add it.

It might also be possible to simply get a scaled-up version from Lulu - it’s on-demand after all. I’m not familiar with Lulu and can’t immediately say if it can be done easily.

As the book is open source itself and you can find the sources and PDFs in the repository, you can format and print it yourself in any size you like. (Trademark issues apply for non-personal use though. The font is also commercial - and not ours.)

[Joonas (Joonas Lehtinen)]

One way of handling the problem: Instead on buying/printing the paper version, use a ebook reader such as iPad or Kindle DX. I have used both with
Full size PDF
as well as with the
Pocket sized one
. I prefer the latter for readability.