Bowerbird's comments are very appropriate. If you have a special book you wish to republish, then you can afford the time and effort to get it ready for POD. I have published 2 books this way, by Jules Verne, which I did as an experiment in republishing a 100 year old book with illustrations. You can see it at WWW.LULU.COM, search for Verne as you will see "The Blockade Runners". Lulu is the only way to go if you do not want to pay up front charges, all other POD publishers require $500 up front. The disadvantage with Lulu is that you have to be prepared to get the book ready for press. There are a lot of things necessary to do this -- just take page numbers for example, getting them on the right place on the page (different for right and left maybe) running headers, page breaks or not for chapters, illustrations, cover design, back cover design, blurb for cover insert, art work for cover, footnotes properly numbered and placed on the page, choice of fonts, you may need type 1 fonts for a good appearance, you may need Adobe or Quark to do a half way presentable job for your book. It took me about 6 weeks to get my books (they are partly identical) ready for Lulu. They came out very well, and even selling them at cost comes out at $6 and then there is uncle sam's $2 minimum for postage so none have been sold. Admittedly this is not a barn burner of a book, but as a dual language text it would be very useful as the French is quite elementary. I will probably do another book or two, I would like to get better pictures. The POD presses use 600 dpi lasers, 1200 dpi lasers are available and are a must for decent half tone pictures.(Letterpress uses 400 lpi plus). Unfortunately Lulu does not yet have them. Good luck on your first project! ----- Original Message ----- From: "grendelkhan" <grendelkhan@gmail.com> To: <gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org> Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2005 5:28 PM Subject: [gutvol-d] Print-on-demand and dead-tree copies of Gutenberg texts.
I was having a discussion with my father, and I thought I would bring it up on the mailing list, as it seems to be the place for it.
We'd just come out of our local Wal-Mart, and I'd noticed the out-of-copyright books (classics and such) being sold for $6 to $11 each. I commented that folks could just download the books for free if they wanted to read them, but he asked how many people owned a computer, and how many of those had heard of Project Gutenberg?
So I did a bit of researching, and discovered that there exist "print on demand" publishers, which instead of doing the offset-printing runs of thousands and thousands of books, will, once a book has been prepared and typeset, sometimes keep none at all in stock, and print them only when ordered.
It seems that it would be a good idea to come up with some way to offer the majority of PG's catalog through some method of print-on-demand publishing, selling at-cost. Many Gutenberg works are obscure, and not of general enough interest to warrant a print run from a traditional publisher.
I'm aware that I could clearly run off and do this myself, but (a) I wanted to get some feedback from the community at large, and (b) print-on-demand publishing still requires start-up costs, and a per-book "setup" fee of some kind, above and beyond the per-copy materials cost. Given that PG has the Distributed Proofreaders to provide lots and lots of work on worthy projects, and given that PGLAF is a charitable organization which lots of people love, is there some way to get around that issue?
Would it be worth it to provide a source of dead-tree editions of many of the archive's works? Thoughts? Objections? Pointers to some guy who's been doing this for the last ten years that I failed to Google up?
--grendelkhan _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d