About Fedora coffee table book....

[Nicu Buculei]

Doug Berry wrote:
>> Nicu Buculei wrote:
>> Why do you make the assumption that we don't know to use GIMP? And we are >talking here about imported photos, not about newly created images.
> 
> 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.

Yeah, and for any Linux-based photographer that tool is GIMP. I think is 
a good think to insist to produce the book exclusively with tools 
available in Fedora.

>> 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.

I see you are coming from film... in the digital world we use Megapixels 
not DPI :p We have to define the target print size and from this the 
needed minimum resolution, which would probably be something around 4 or 
5 Megapixels.

And only absolute newbies will set their camera to something less than 
4MP, storage space is cheap, the photos made by my camera at 12MP 
usually have under 5MB in JPEG format and around 15MB as RAW. You may 
not see this on the photos posted on flickr, since those are optimised 
for web use.

> 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.  

Not everybody, but you will be surprised how many of us have such toys. 
I believe I saw in Brno over 10 people with such toys and at least 5 of 
them would probably love to get involved in such a project.

> I'm sure we could probably come up with thousands of photos, worldwide. And if they are all high-res digital quality then that would make to job so much easier. But it is probably best to assume that most will not make the cut for one reason or another. 

Sure most won't make the cut, what we have so far was not made with 
printing in mind.

>> How I can run trough a scanner my photos, they are already in a digital >format...
> 
> Are submissions for the book only open to persons who have digital cameras?
> I would think that would rule out a lot of people from participating, right there.

I think we don't want to leave anybody out, but from my experience the 
huge majority work digitally.

> Scribus is great, I have used it for so much and it keeps getting better and better. On the Scribus website, www.scribus.net, they list several books that were developed using Scribus. One new one is a Chinese language text book on the morphology of the leaf-beetle.

We have used it here mostly for posters, stickers and CD covers. Putting 
a book together should be a useful experience.

> 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.

I think we have some in-house competence for those tasks.

> 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.  

Selecting the publisher is an area where I decline competence and leave 
the decision for the others.


-- 
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