The best way to see what is involved in publishing POD texts is to actually do that on Lulu. I have no interest financially one wayor another in Lulu, but they do offer a service: for the upfront per item charge of $4 and .02 per page (cheaper than xerox) they keep your book available on their hard drive in perpeptuity, or until they go out of business. This $4 charge is buried in the $500 up front charge by other POD publishers. Please note that Lulu is not doing the publishing, they are just providing a needed service between the producer of the book and Ingram, Lightspeed, and other POD sites which print thousands of texts per day. These biggies are not interested in answering your phone call, and their product is marketed through publishing channels for $20 to $30 per paperback copy, something Lulu provides for $6. Not that Lulu, as any small company in a niche market, has not had some problems. But these are largely faced up front on their message boards and addressed conscientiously by management. Taking a book through Lulu involves going through 6 steps that are the bare minimum for a publishing process. I encourage those who are interested in POD to actually get their feet wet and produce a book. Have you thought about cover art? Are you a professional illustrator? Can you afford an artist? And if as I found no one will buy a Lulu book even at their cost of $6, then even lowering the price to $1 would not produce any sales in this marketing oriented world. And do not forget there are massmarket publishers of pd books at $3 to $5 such as the Wordsworth Classics, you just do not see them in bookstores and must special order them. Also due to marketing processes they are not handled by book distributors but by newsvendors, which makes them even more difficult to obtain. And , as often the case in PG, the source of the 1800 version is not noted but is left to booksleuths to determine, it is not unusual that "sales" are low. Case in point: Journey to the Centre of the Earth, available on PG as a Journey to the Interior of the Earth, tr by Frederick A. Malleson, a fairly complete and literary Victorian translation, $3.95 special order at Barnes and Noble. ----- Original Message ----- From: "grendelkhan" <grendelkhan@gmail.com> To: <gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org> Sent: Wednesday, June 15, 2005 4:22 PM Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Print-on-demand and dead-tree copies of Gutenbergtexts.
Thanks to everyone for their comments so far! I'm learning quite a bit as I go.
As of October 2003, the US Commerce department reported that about three-fifths of households had a computer; a little over half had internet access.
https://www.esa.doc.gov/Reports/NationOnlineBroadband04.htm
So it's not as bad as I was led to believe. Still,
Perhaps I should have stated my goals a little more clearly. I have no particular interest in making money or making a business out of this. I'd simply like to make the books available---through whatever means that may be---in dead-tree form. I suppose it's a terrible idea fo tie the actual Project to a commercial entity by developing a working relationship with them---I don't think an "Official Project Gutenberg Edition" is a good idea.
lulu.com, as mentioned, has no setup fees, but their pricing is a mite stiff---$4.53 plus $0.02/page. Certainly better than buying stuff from most university presses, but not exactly bargain-basement. Lightning Source charges (based on some quick googling at
http://com1.runboard.com/bthescribesmessageboard.fwritingarchives.t45%7Coffs et=15
), $0.90 plus $0.013 per page, but I don't know what kind of binding that requires, or what sort of setup fees they charge. Perhaps they'd waive them if DP put out some sort of print-ready version in addition to human-readable text. I'm thinking TeX->PDF here, as it's pretty much the stablest human-readable-yet-fully-marked-up format available. Thoughts? I suppose I should take a relatively short etext, mark it up and see how it looks.
I concur that simply throwing plain text, or even decent HTML, at paper is a horrible idea. So, what I ask is---is there a way to prepare the etexts as, in addition to HTML, whatever format is print-ready for these machines? Since typesetting a ready copy is a simple matter of feeding it to a Xerox DocuTech or whatever the $100,000 piece of hardware the print shop uses is, how can we do the necessary preprocessing ourselves? What exactly does the "setup fee" include?
Thanks to everyone again for being so helpful with this.
--grendelkhan _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d