[Ambassadors] Re: Picture Book....

Sat Jan 3 23:18:45 UTC 2009

On Sat, Jan 03, 2009 at 07:45:45AM -0800, Doug Berry wrote:
> > I don't see any reason why not.  We just want to make
> > sure we know who is holding the money, and how much there
> > ends up being.  I think it's a pretty simple &
> > straightforward problem to solve.
> 
> If I may jump in on this for a moment. The only way we
> would ever sell or handle any books ourselves, would be
> if we chose to buy them from Lightning Source and sell
> them.
> 
> Otherwise all sales would be handled by Lightning Source
> and they would provide us with strict accounting for each
> sale. They are a division of Ingram Book Services, which
> handles half the books in the world and is a multi-billion
> dollar enterprise.
> 
> Once the book(s) are in the Ingram database, we can just
> direct any buyers to Amazon, Wal-mart, any book store with
> a computer, and a zillion other on-line vendors. 
> 
Do we want to set up a website somewhere and point shoppers to
Amazon.com or whatnot? (Gah, I'm thinking way too far ahead again)

> Lightning Source would then send us a royalty check, I
> think it's every three months. We can just have them send 
> it to Max and he can disburse any funds.
> 
You OK with this, Max? We could just plan for this, and it would make me
feel a lot better if we got this problem out of the way first ^_^

> Also, I have a bunch of documents that Lightning Source
> sent me. They are pretty thorough in breaking down the 
> costs and establishing what we can expect from them. I
> tried to send them to some people over the mailing lists
> email, but the file size was to big and it crashed. I also
> sent them to Ian, so if anyone wants a copy, they would
> need to provide him or I with a outside email address.
> 
I've placed them here: http://ianweller.fedorapeople.org/lsi-docs/

<braindump type="mine!">

So here's what I'm thinking initially: we publish four books ("Volumes
1-4"), each entitled something like "The Fedora Book: Friends", or
whatever, for each of the four foundations (freedom, friends, features,
first).

Each book would contain about 80 pages. (LSI requires page counts in
multiples of 4; for reference, The Love Book has 96 pages.) If we go
less than 80 pages, we can't put text on the spine (which would
definitely help in identifying the book on a shelf with four or so
different copies of The Fedora Book).

80 pages: (odd pages on right side, even on left)
  1. Title page
  2. Copyright (CC-BY-SA, right?)/cataloging data
  3-4. Introduction by current FPL (if Paul doesn't take up two pages,
       make page 3 blank)
  5. Introduction of the foundation whose story is being told in this
     book, with wonderful Four Foundations livery provided by Mo
  6-77. Photos and stories of contributors
  78-79. Index of contributors across all books published so far
  80. Left blank because LSI told us to (they stick an internal barcode
      on here)

I envision the pages being in full color. LSI will print a full color
book, sized 8.5" x 8.5" (whoa, another parallel to The Love Book!) with
80 pages, for $8.20 per unit (book). Setup for the title comes out to
$75 (half for the cover, half for the pages), and to make the book
available to Amazon and the like, we are charged $12/yr for each ISBN.

Add to this cost the necessity of getting a proof for each individual
book. For an 80-page book, this would be $22.20. And, we need ISBNs.
Doug mentioned this would be $275 for a block of 10 ISBNs.

The initial cost, then, is $711.80 for the four books. Setting the
wholesale markup to $15 keeps the price reasonable for both buyers and
us -- we can recoup the cost for all four books with 105 sales.[1] Add
to this an additional $48/yr after the first year -- and remember, this
isn't including any additional books that we may want to produce after
these four. Also, keep in mind that we still have six more ISBNs to do
whatever with. The initial cost for the next six books would be $87 plus
$12 per year after the first year.

[1]: This is overall sales of all the four books, not each one.

(For those who may be wondering where any of this information is, it's
not in the POD manual (USOPSMANUAL080108.pdf), it's in US COLOR PRICE
SHEET 091508.pdf.)

I would like to mention that the proposal Doug emailed to me pertains to
only one book, while this pertains to an initial four.

</braindump>

Questions I have for you guys:
1. Does this sound reasonable? Does it seem viable that we can sell 105
   copies in a year? For those who will be in the book, or other Fedora
   contributors, or other Fedora fans, the $60 for the first set of four
   price seems a bit large. I'm not really sure.
2. On a totally unrelated note, where are we going to stick all of the
   photos for this project? We need somewhere where we can also enter
   their "story", and where others can upload their photos into a
   moderation queue. Flickr is what I see in my mind as being the least
   trouble, but it's not open source, and most of the photograhpers
   would need a pro account ($30something/yr) to upload many high-res
   photos. Oh, and we need a solution by Thursday ^_^

Plus, Paul mentioned someone taking the leadership of this project (as
that would behoove him). Doug mentioned to me that he'd like to see me
defined as the leader, so I'm cool with that, if everybody else is.
(However I'm not sure who needs to register on LSI's website if Max is
the one getting all the moneys.)

I'm quite excited that we're seeing life to this project :)

-- 
Ian Weller <ianweller at gmail.com>                  http://ianweller.org
GnuPG fingerprint:  E51E 0517 7A92 70A2 4226  B050 87ED 7C97 EFA8 4A36
"Technology is a word that describes something that doesn't work yet."
  ~ Douglas Adams
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