I read your message and realized that I just might be the "some guy" you were talking about. A while back (probably 10 - 12 years ago) I spoke with some professors about using PG texts in their classes. I thought that ebooks would be a good alternative to overpriced short press runs aimed at impoverished college students. At that time, the response I got from everyone I spoke to was that the quality of PG texts was just not high enough for academics to endorse them as a teaching tool. After hearing that, I thought very seriously about starting a publishing business that would match up young professors (badly in need of publishing credits in their hope of becoming tenured) with PG texts and bringing out edited, and possibly annotated, editions. I suspected that this could be done at a very reasonable cost and would be a benefit to the students as well as the professors. I ended up not pursuing that idea, and it's probably just as well that I didn't. A lot has changed in the past decade, notably: - Thanks to Distributed Proofreaders the accuracy of PG texts has increased -enormously-, likewise the breadth of the PG collection. - I learned that annotated editions would likely encumber public domain work with newly copyrighted material. This would limit students' ability to modify and redistribute the materials. - The rise of Creative Commons and Science Commons has given academics many new venues to publish outside of the mainstream presses. - Print on demand has become a viable business, with press runs of one copy now being profitable. - Brewster Kahle's bookmobile was just flat out cooler than anything I ever imagined, and it works really well. With all that said, I -still- this it would be great to have good quality editions of public domain works available at a reasonable cost to students and anyone else who doesn't want to overpay for a book. The limitation now in creating a print on demand service for PG books is that the main POD publishers tend to want an upfront fee to cover their setup and storage costs. In many cases, this may be about $500 per title. My guess is that this cost would be prohibitive for PG. I do not know if any POD publishers have expressed interest in waiving this fee for Project Gutenberg. Also, some PG volunteers are working on a standard system for publishing texts in a markup language called TEI-Lite. As I understand it, this markup language (it's a dialect of XML) would make it much easier to offer electronic texts in a variety of formats, including some that would be suitable for printing and binding. This markup would largely replace the academic editor I had imagined. If you decide to go forward with this idea, I would be very interested to hear more. I'm not interested in running a publishing house at this point in my life, but I would certainly want to order some books! --Ian On Jun 14, 2005, at 2:28 PM, grendelkhan wrote:

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

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On Tue, 14 Jun 2005, grendelkhan wrote:

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?

There have been over a billion computers in use in the world for some time now, and thus well over a billion computer users. In the US the computer saturation rate is somewhere around ~7/8 of all US households. [Anyone have the latest figures?] Not to mention that ~3/4 of these households have hi-speed access. As to how many of these people know about Project Gutenberg, that's hard to measure. . .perhaps we should do a survey. As for the rest of the world, the US is far from being the most saturated in terms of either computers or access, and in some lists doesn't even make the top ten. . .for some reason the Scandiavian countries seemed to beat us there. More later, Michael

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