Picture Book....

Concerning the Fedora Picture Book.... I have heard from several dozen printers and publishers over the last several weeks. There are several things I would like to comment on: 1. Using a printer or print-run publisher would be unfeasible because we would have to store and ship books ourselves, to say nothing of mailing costs. 2. Using a POD Publisher, such a Lulu or iUniverse is probably the most readily available option, but it would be the most expensive. For instance, for a 130 page full color book, Lulu would charge $30.50 per book. Anything we make would be added on to that base cost. Most of the other top POD Publishers charge a set fee, such as BookSurge a $499.00 color book package. 3. Using the same POD publishers, if we went with a color cover but black and white interior, the price would drop substantially: Lulu - $8.75 per book after their setup fee. 4. The most economical option would be to go to the POD publishing source itself, which is Lightning Source. They are the printer/distributor for most of the POD Publishers, including Lulu. The drawback here is that we would have to commit to publishing more than one book. If we use Lightning Source the base cost for the full color book would be $6.80 per book. We could sell it for $14.00, not an unreasonable price and make over $7.00 a book. Our costs would be $144.00 up front for their set-up costs. As you can see, we would only have to sell a couple dozen books to recoup that cost. 5. Perhaps, if we used Lightning Source we could do a Picture Book for each Fedora Release. "The people of Fedora 11," then use the same event photos, but add pictures and bios of core developers, Red Hat people, other Project members, etc. I have created a breakdown of the whole process, with cost comparisons. Plus some ideas I had about adding new writers and perhaps artists if we go with some sort of publishing project. I will add links to these documents on the Picture Book wiki, asap. Here are the links if anyone is interested: http://www.scribd.com/doc/9668043/publishing http://www.scribd.com/doc/9669285/wiki What does anybody think? -- w Douglas Berry -- slasherzee(a)fedoraproject.org