Picture Book....

Doug Berry slasherzee at yahoo.com
Fri Jan 2 07:35:17 UTC 2009


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 at fedoraproject.org


      




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