[Ambassadors] Re: About Fedora coffee table book....

[Ian Weller]

On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 11:14:47AM -0800, Doug Berry wrote:
> The GIMP or any other imaging program is just a means to an end - it is a way of taking lesser quality images and enhancing them. You can bet that every photograph published in a book anywhere was gone over and enhanced at some point, either by the original photographer or some where down the line.
> 
I guess you fail to realize that Nicu and I are both on the art team,
and we have Mo helping us out with this. We all know how to use the GIMP
pretty fluently.

> >Do you think we use our mobile phones to take photos? Most of the cameras >I saw used at the last FUDCon were DSLRs. Isn't this enough?
> 
> Maybe, maybe not. Most digital cameras are set to take lower resolution photos, simply so you can fit more pictures onto the storage disc. Taking more pictures is the assumed goal. For example, a digital photo shot at 150 dpi may come in at 100K. If you beefed it up to say 600 or1000 dpi it might top out at 100 megs. Most people set there camera resolutions as low as possible to get more pictures.
> 
> And digital cameras are still relatively expensive and not everybody in the Fedora World Community may have them. Many dinosaurs like me still use film.  
> 
Mo has a DSLR, she'll be at FUDCon Boston.

> >I don't remember seeing something about turning a profit.
> 
> I think someone said something about donating any proceeds to charity, or something like that.
> 
I did mention possibly donating to OLPC or something *if* we turned up a
profit, which would be totally unnecessary.

> Lulu is okay, but they are pricey. Print-On-Demand is great for authors. It pays the highest royalties in the business. And the process, where no books are printed unless there is a paid order, is good too. As compared to large print runs for a fixed price. But if the books do not sale you have a garage full of books.
> 
> But what POD publishers do not do, or for which they charge a fortune, is all the little things that add quality to a book. Like: spell-checking, grammar-checking, fact-checking, cover art (many force you to use gaudy one-size-fits-all cover templates), and layout. Layout is the most important part of the process, and is something that authors should do themselves: authors or their Book Packagers.
> 
The book sources will be posted to fedora-art-list,
fedora-marketing-list, and plenty of other lists for people to check
over. I will diligently be checking every page's grammer and speeling,
and I'm sure others will be too.

> So, as far as a publisher goes, POD is a viable option, but perhaps something like Cafe Press would be a better choice. Although I have never used them, as I understand and this may have changed, if we laid out and created the embedded PDF files containing the book, burn them onto a CD or DVD, send them to Cafe Press, for a nominal fee ($200.00, I've heard, but it may be more for a coffee table book) they assign an ISBN, create the bar-code and send the book to Lightning Source, their printer fulfiller.
> 
> Or we could bypass a publisher altogether and publish it ourselves. Fedora Publishing Project, and how you might ask would we accomplish that. Well, Red Hat must already be a digital or even a print publisher, perhaps we could spin-off a print franchise or something. Red Hat must also have some sort of relationship with a quality printer, for labels, brochures, advertising, etc. RED Hat may already have everything we would need. Such as ISBN numbers (block of ten around $300.00), since published software requires ISBN type control numbers, bar-codes, and the like. Packaging a DVD is not much different then packaging a book.  
> 
This seems like a very viable option, thanks for brining that up.

> We already have the necessary software to layout and create all the elements of the book. Using Scribus, OO, Abiword, and the GIMP, we could create every part of the book ourselves. In fact, I think we already have everything we would need to make the book; it is more like assembling it then it is creating it from scratch.
> 
Yeah, I realize that :)

> Or we could take Fedora Publishing to Lightning Source. They are a division of Ingrams and they do not charge their publishers a fortune. They make their money printing and selling books. They charge a reasonable set-up fee, and a small per book printing charge. Then they take the order, print the book, and mail it to the customer . Publisher does none of that.
> 
Ooh, nice.

> As an example of this, Scribus just had published their latest manual in book form. I am assuming they did all the layout and the book is coming out almost as we speak. Is different then out book, a 450 page tome, that costs 26 pounds. So this is just an example to show it can be done.
> 
Douglas, are you willing to help us with the publishing process? If so,
pipe in on fedora-marketing-list, or start making necessary edits to the
page on the wiki[1]. I'm not worried at all about having high-enough
quality photos or the inability to edit the pages together (I'm already
starting to work on mockups, I'll be sending those out soonish) -- what
I am worried about is getting this done in a timely matter with the
least cost to us and those who want to buy the book.

I'm glad you have some experience in this business... I have a lot of
experience with POD for shirts, but not books. Maybe we can talk on IRC
sometime, ping me in #fedora-marketing (ianweller).

Please, I would like to keep this all on fedora-marketing-list.

[1]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Picture_book

-- 
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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