bwahaha

[jazzfish]

"Those objecting to the inclusion of Tom Sawyer [in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen] should remember that what you say about his company is what you say about society." --from a comment thread on an RPG.net review of the movie

I predict that a very small number of my readers will find this statement hilarious, and the rest will respond with a resounding "Huh?"

Also: Lady Pixie Moondrip's Guide to Craft Names: "Nearly anyone can carry off, say, 'Lady Niwalen,' but it takes a special kind of person to handle a name like 'Lord Jehovah God Almighty.' Fortunately, there are those among us who are equal to the task." (I should really stop linking to things that Teresa Nielsen Hayden finds, and instead just tell you all to read her blog and check the links under 'Particles' daily.)

Comments

[zerblinitzky.livejournal.com]

(is that even a word?)

If not, it should be.

What do you think of a service like Cafepress, except with books? You send them a bunch of text (maybe PDF?) and some images for the cover, and they print a book for anyone who orders one.
I am declaring this my dumb idea of the day (tm). Tell me why it's impossible, oh ye who knows much more about books than I do?

Print On Demand

[jazzfish]

Funny you should mention. CafePress has actually started up something like that in beta-test. bOING bOING mentioned it a couple weeks ago.

(Hm. Looks like it's scheduled to emerge from beta tomorrow, according to the website.)

The problem? Cost. CafePress publishing charges a flat fee of seven bucks for a perfect binding (the type you see on normal books, as opposed to the self-explanatory saddle-stitch or wire-O), plus three cents a page, works out to the stereotypical two-hundred-page novel being thirteen bucks. That's with no profit on your end.

(Coincidentally, two hundred pages is the point at which a saddle-stitch book costs the same as a perfect-bound. Anything more and perfect is cheaper.)

Now, your average trade paperback retails for about $14, and that cost already includes things like marketing and shipping. Figure twenty bucks for our two-hundred-page novel, easy. And who wants to pay that much when they can get two trades from Amazon for that price?

CafePress sez size is irrelevant, so you could maybe make some money with RPG books like this, which typically retail for twenty bucks. Or computer books, or anything where people are trained to expect to pay more. But probably not in the mainstream market, not yet.

(Other problems include things like layout and editing being Tougher Than You Think (there's a reason publishers pay people to do them) and marketing in general.)

Re: Print On Demand

[zerblinitzky.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you're right, fiction probably won't be cost-effective. But for a small game company (gaming stuff is priced high anyway) or a small niche software thing, this might be a cheap way to publish rulebooks/manuals that don't look like they came straight from Kinko's.
Any requirement on the pages being text? You could do a graphic novel; people are used to paying $20 for far fewer pages than 200 in those.