= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Zaine comments on Help us name the Sequences ebook - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (146)
Kickstarter?
I think there are vanity presses that will print on-demand as people order, without a large (or any) upfront payment. From there it's just a matter of whether people want the books enough to pay the high price.
For example, there's lulu.com. (This is not a recommendation as I have no experience publishing through them; it's just the first name that came to mind.) You can upload a PDF and cover images, choose paper size / type, binding, etc. and publish. They also offer ISBNs and publishing through Amazon.
Their pricing calculator is here. I think you can set any price you want for the book, as long as it's above the manfacturing cost (and there'll be shipping charges for customers).
Some examples I ran up:
2500 pages in 4 volumes means 625 pages/volume. (Lulu.com specifies a maximum of 740 pages per book.) I don't know the page size which comes to 2500 pages, though.
Personally I would be willing to pay between 75 and 110 $ to buy a nice hardcover four-volume set, as a gift for someone who doesn't like ebooks.
I would pay one of these prices for my own set. I'm a little unsatisfied with note-taking and highlighting on ebooks and would love a physical copy to annotate and wear out.
Including Amazon, by way of Ingram. I would actually suggest making this available as a Kindle book (or books) as well, although in that event I would recommend setting the ebook price close to the print price as a quality/value signal. The money can benefit MIRI or CFAR, and as long as the print+ebook offered via Amazon is a different edition than the one offered free, there should probably not be any problem with Amazon's pricing rule oddities.
The plan is to create a PDF, .epub, and .mobi version—just like the Facing the Intelligence Explosion eBook—and make it available on our site, as well as through Amazon and iBooks.
As for pricing we want it to be accessible, so it will either be free or very inexpensive.
Amazon (rather wisely IMO) has minimum pricing requirements for ebooks, though at the moment that'd be $2.99 for books of this size.
However, from a signaling perspective it's better to have a pricey book that a few people buy and the rest steal, than to have a book that looks too cheap to be of actual value. People also are less likely to read a cheaper book in the first place (even if they bought it) or to apply the ideas therein, since if the author/publisher didn't think it was that valuable, why should they?
Do you plan on enforcing copyright on the extant ebook versions of the sequences?
Using a print on demand (POD) service is an interesting idea. The print quality of POD is lower then offset printing, so I'd be concerned that people might be disappointed in the quality, especially if they payed close to $100 for the full set.
We'll ponder this, but no promises . . .
Note that all of those costs are plus shipping and plus whatever cut (if any) the author gets. Fortunately I don't think the objective here is to make money, just to disseminate the book.