grendelkhan said:

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.

but it costs money to do it. so you have to "make a business out of it" in order to do it in the first place... unless you have a lot of money to throw down the toilet. and you don't have to worry about "making money", because unless some big miracle strikes, or you are particularly clever about how you go about it, you won't make any money. you're far more likely to lose your shirt. so "avoiding the loss of money" is your real objective here. if you can't afford to lose any money, you should stay away.

I'd simply like to make the books available ---through whatever means that may be--- in dead-tree form.

right. but you can't just wave a wand and make it happen.

lulu.com, as mentioned, has no setup fees, but their pricing is a mite stiff---$4.53 plus $0.02/page.

that $4.53 _is_ a setup fee, whether they call it that or not. and since it's $4.53 _per_ book, it's a rather high one at that. (if you really want the best p.o.d. price, i'll dig that up for you. there's one site offering quotes based on several p.o.d. places.)

I'm thinking TeX->PDF here

ok, but who puts all the e-texts into tex format? that's a real cost, a very real cost, and it's huge.

Thoughts? I suppose I should take a relatively short etext, mark it up and see how it looks.

why a "relatively short" one? that'll just lead you to underestimate the actual cost, which is the best way to lose money fast. mark up one of average size and difficulty, and then multiply it by about 11,000, and then you'll have a good idea of the true cost.

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?

there will be, very shortly, yes -- my viewer-program. given some minor editing of an e-text for consistency, usually 5-10 minutes for most e-texts, it will format the book according to the user's specifications (as to font, size, leading, colors, and paper-size, which dave mentioned in regard to european users) and create a .pdf. putting this program into the hands of end-users, so they can create their own output, to their own specs, and print it out on their own machines, is one route to giving them hard-copy versions of all the e-texts. it's not the only route, but since it puts all the power and all the _costs_ on their shoulders, it is likely to be the one that gets implemented more than others... -bowerbird