Subject: Re: [lojban] how can i help lojban? what can $ do?

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 15:05:19 -0400

At 11:26 PM 07/20/2001 -0500, Michal Wallace wrote:
>On Fri, 20 Jul 2001, Bob LeChevalier (lojbab) wrote:
>
> > If we want to publish books, we need lots of money (thousands of
> > dollars). We still haven't paid off the loan from the refgrammar
> > yet.
>
>Thousands? Maybe next time you should try a trade paperback. I've
>lookd at http://www.morrispublishing.com/ before, and was quite
>impressed. I'm not sure where my price guide went, but I seem to
>recall they were pretty cheap. Order their guide.. It's free, and they
>send pricing and some nice example books.

I just looked. 1000 copies of a 250 page book at 8.5" x 5.5" costs $2.63 a 
book; 1500 copies (which was the print run for the refgrammar) is 
2.45/book That is $2630 for 1000 or $3675 for 1500. And since Nick has 
sized the book at 9x6, he would have to trim the margins and do some more 
page squeezing on his tables for the slightly smaller size, and the page 
count might go to 300, which is $2.96/book for 1000, $2.76 for 1500.

There is also a $5/page charge to go from computer disk files, which is how 
we would have them based on Nick's work, to camera ready copy. That is 
another $1500 for a 300 page book. Of course, Morris won't take any of the 
computer formats, only plain-text. I know of other printers that will take 
Postscript, if not PDF. We can prepare our own camera-ready from PDF, but 
that takes getting access to a linotype-quality printer, and cutting the 
paper down to size afterwards.

There also is a charge for the cover, unless it is one of their stock 
covers. Probably only a couple hundred dollars, but it is still a 
cost. There will also be shipping costs, again probably only a few hundred 
dollars, but it adds up.

Yes, thousands. And depending on preorders, LLG might have to sell a 300 
page book at $20+ to break even reasonably soon (we took 4 years to hit 300 
books with the refgrammar).

Alternatively, cut the print run to 500 and we pay $3.59 for a 300 page 
book, and for a run of only 300, we pay $4.64. We've cut the cost down, 
but it is still over a thousand dollars, and with the expensive 
proof-making process, the print cost becomes less than the prep costs.

BTW, thanks for the Morris site. Nice to have a quick on line reference to 
get a quick cost estimate for comparisons when I call other printers (many 
of whom will insist on doing a full quote in order to give me any pricing 
data at all).

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
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