grendelkhan said:
Would it be worth it to provide a source of dead-tree editions of many of the archive's works?
"worth it" to whom? :+)
Thoughts?
it's a nice thought, to be sure. one that many people have had. but not an easy one to implement.
Objections?
it's very smart of you to ask. so i will tell you some pitfalls. i tell you this not to dissuade you, so if you think you can make it work anyway, just go right ahead and do it. but know that these are some issues... the start-up costs are very real, so you won't get a p.o.d.-printer to waive them, even for a charity. and printed in runs of a few copies, the books still are fairly expensive. plus the shipping costs will eat you up. in addition, if you just ran the books off as they are -- as plain old ascii text -- people would largely turn their noses up. there is a certain minimum standard that we have come to expect from "a book", and failure to meet that is a recipe for failure. even the .html versions of the books won't create a p-version that would be acceptable. so you'd have to invest time/money/energy in some desktop-publishing capabilities... even after all that, in today's marketplace, simply creating a product won't do very much. today's customers are subjected to such heavy marketing that they simply won't move at all unless you bombard 'em with more of the same. that means you'd have to do hype and marketing, and probably pay for shelf-space in bookstores. and by then, you've just become another publisher... but you'd still lose out to the publishing houses, because their versions would have slicker covers. finally, if you ever _did_ make it work, by some miracle or other, you should then expect to receive vicious _flak_ from people who will _resent_ you, because you're "getting rich" off their volunteer labor and "selling something that should be given away free". so unless you have a _very_ thick skin...
Pointers to some guy who's been doing this for the last ten years that I failed to Google up?
nobody has been doing it, for the reasons i listed. that doesn't mean that nobody _will_ be doing it, however. if you're really serious about the idea, see where daniel moynihan is working these days... at blackmask.com, he demonstrated clearly that a plain-text master-file can take you a long way. he hasn't said so directly, but reading in between the pages, i'm guessing he's going even farther now. ;+) -bowerbird