Re: [lojban] free copies of "was-ist-lojban"

["Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <lojbab@lojban.org>]

At 09:01 PM 06/27/2001 +0200, =?utf-8?q?Bj=C3=B6rn=20Gohla?= wrote:
> working on my translation i found this:
>           <para>Helping to publicize the language, of course, does not
>           take a lot of time, or necessarily even knowing the
>           language.  Talk to friends, relatives and colleagues.  We
>           will gladly provide copies of this brochure upon your
>           request.  Lojban tends to sell itself; people who become
>           informed tend to be interested to at least some
>           degree.</para>
>
> does that mean brochures are supposed to be given away free, and who is we?

You can give away brochures for free. We have a nominal charge for all our 
printed materials of US$.10 a page, but for level 0 packages in the past 
(which include the brochure), we have given them out to anyone who asked 
whether they sent us money or not, then list the value of the brochure as a 
negative on their balance, one that we did not worry whether it got 
paid.  We will probably continue to give out the brochure alone for free 
after the Nickbooks are done, but our focus at that point will be on 
selling or otherwise distributing the books.

At some conventions, we have printed up a stack of brochures and put them 
out on a table, and that is what the above paragraph was referring 
to.  That was in the pre-Internet world, and it was a way to get the word 
out to as many as possible, but we historically have gotten few actual 
orders for materials from such distributions - it gives us name recognition 
and little else.

My suggestion therefore would be to rewrite the paragraph to suggest that 
people point to our web page, note that we encourage people who wish to do 
so to print materials out from our web page for personal use or promotion 
of the language.  Especially overseas, we gain little from asking people to 
send us money for paper that we are selling at no profit.

Nick should probably make corresponding changes in the official version for 
the book.

lojbab
--
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                    703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:                 http://www.lojban.org