Any place that uses a photocopier will be paying the manufacturer about 2-3 cents per print for lease/service/toner, and a sheet of paper is about 1c (therefore each print on a double-sided sheet is ).5c). Therefore a copyshop's cost for double-sided (duplex) printing is about 3-4c per print - smaller places with smaller volume will have higher costs but work on lower profits, Officeworks has lower costs but works on higher profits, so expect a 4-5c minimum per 'side' price no matter where you go unless you have a 'mate on the inside' who just might not see his job as being longterm.

Buying your own ink based (not toner) printer will involve very little cost of the machine, but the ink can be 15c+ per page unless you install a system to feed the little ink cartridges from large bottles as do printshops running the wide-format ink printers. Ink printers are best used for pages with exceptionaly little print, as there's no 'click' cost for printing the page, and the only real cost is for the ink used. But this isn't the case for songbooks where the print is often 10-15% coverage of the page - typical quoted ink costs per page are based on 3-5% coverage.

Buying your own laser printer is pretty much the same as buying a photocopier, but normally without an all-in service fee but instead you buy your own toner and parts. The toner for a small laser printer will typically be more than twice the cost of toner for a large photocopier (when weighed gram for gram), so don't be fooled by manufacturer's claims based on 2-3% coverage when your books will almost certainly be 10-15%. Cheap toner is available, but rarely much cheaper, and it normally wears drums and heat-fixing rollers much faster. The main parts needed for laser printers are the drum and fixing roller (these are often part of a toner-cartridge, thus making that a rather expensive item) - and these parts are both expensive and wear out quickly, often representing 3-6c per page in cost. Many, but not all, Kyocera copiers and lasr printers (also branded as Mita) use a ceramic drum with exceptionally longer life, and this underlines their claimed consdierably lower total cost per page printed. If anyone tells you that their own laser printer is cheaper for printing their songbooks than paying retail at Officeworks, then they either can't do the maths, or haven't considered that if this really were the case that Officeworks would scrap their big machines and buy little laser printers.

The cheapest cost per page comes from traditional offset printing where there is no 'click' cost, ink is really cheap, but a printing plate needs to be made for each page, and this expense negates the other savings when less than 100 or so copies are made - but remember this for your leaflets.

The old spirit duplicator has evolved and now looks more like a photocopier because it's how a nice neat box with a scanner on top and the old duplicator buried inside - some smaller printshops, and secretarial places, use these. The quality is now certainly good enough for songlists, they only print onto 70gsm+ non-glossy paper, the ink is cheap and so are the 'paper masters' - but they still need to make a 'paper-master' for each page, and this still represents a fair expense when printing less than about 30-50 of each page. The other thing to bear in mind is that they must, like the traditional offset-printing machine, print all pages in separate stacks - copiers, laser printers and ink printers these days can output a collated book at t a time due to be digitally fed from a computer.

So it comes back to the more pages you print, the greater the cost, and that there's a base price that's hard to reduce no matter the different methods you try.

That being the case, is there a solution in having different books - instead of, say, 10 complete books, having a couple of complete ones, a couple for all male artists, a couple for country, etc. I always fine with two complete books tied to a desk (as long as it's not right in front of the console, and as long as there's sufficient light. I love having a book to myself at a table by myself, but I always wonder how the host can justify the cost of that.
Submitted by David on 15-01-2009

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