A book publisher is someone who deals in intellectual property. As a self-publisher, you handle the promotion and marketing of the material you write and you own the copyright. These are areas that would be handled by publishers in the trade publishing route. In contrast, a book printer is in charge of using technology (and ink) to take your words and putting them onto paper to create a book. New forms of printing and publishing, such as print on demand, mean that the division between these roles has become blurred.
If you are publishing and printing your own book, try to get hold of a Pantone swatch book. This will make it easy to choose the colors you want to use on your pages. Beware, though: printers guard these like gold dust as they are quite expensive.
