A4 or US Letter?

Hi,

I'm not a printer, but I have been tasked with finding the best solution for the printing of multiple volumes of a book series.

The situation is that the books are published by a company in the US, but the market will be global. Due to the publishers initial plans the page size was said to be US Letter. Over the years while the project has been in the planning stages certain aspects have changed which now require finalisation as we get closer to printing the first volume. At first it was thought that the series would be printed in the US and shipped/distributed elsewhere, hence the US Letter page size. Now, due to increasing shipping/distribution costs it might be financially beneficial to print the books in Europe or the Far East rather than the US.

A large number of illustration layouts/pages have already been produced in the US Letter format. While its a pain, it wouldn't be the end of the world to have to juggle the elements around to convert the pages from US Letter to A4 page size.

The question is, would it affect the printing costs or cause unnecessary hassle if we were to continue with the US Letter page size and did the printing in Europe or the Far East? Or would it be better in the long run to simply make the effort now to convert what has been completed to A4 size?

Any advice would be highly appreciated.

Clint (the Illustrator, based in the UK)...

 

Sir, please understand that a high volume printing products are usually not being printed on US Letter or EU A4, but rather on large printing presses on large sheets that can fit 8up of LTR and A4, not these presses are manufactured by several competing companies Heidelberg, Ryobi, Akiyama, ManRoland, Komori to name a few and they are all the same for US and UE markets so it should not matter really is final size is LTR or A4 - sheets will be printed, cut to specified size, collated and made in to the book so it should not be that huge of the deal. Surely final size US Letter will be more of custom size for European Asian printers. You can simply give them MM measurement of US Letter and ask "Hey, the book is Xmm by Ymm, Z many pages and I will need 10,000 or whatever pcs, how much?"

 

Thank you for your kind reply.

Yes, I am aware that much larger sheets of paper are utilised when printing large quantity publications, but surely the system is set up so that when the individual pages are cut/folded they offer the least wastage of the larger sheets and are thus a more economical size?

If the various printers around the world can accommodate either A4 or US Letter or whatever custom page size with negligible variations in cost regardless of the paper wastage then it’s makes my original question irrelevant, but I felt it better to ask for confirmation from the printing community rather than go full steam into the design process and then find out down the line that our chosen page size is not the most financially economical option. Obviously, we want to keep production costs down to the bare minimum so as to not have to pass this off to the customer.

Your advice is appreciated.