[wsfii-discuss] Re: Whole Infrastructure Catalogue

Tue Oct 18 10:11:00 UTC 2005

On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 06:09:47AM +0200, Tomas Krag wrote:

> We are also spending some time researching Print on Demand opportunities
> etc.

I don't know if anyone say Mute's 'Precarity Reader', which was being
show at wsfii. It was a very nice paper back format produced using pod
at very low cost - about 1.50 GBP per copy.

> Admittedly we are not doing this with wiki -> book auto conversion,
> mostly because the printed book is the most important outcome for our
> project, and the on-line version follows on from that.

I talked to Simon who said they were planning some work on a wiki
front end for it which could spits out pdf's straight to the POD
service.

> Importantly (I think) we are not just thinking about how to get a book
> printed (which is easy), but how to get the content of the book
> distributed in such a fashion that it is easy to print locally in the
> developing world. Just a reminder that printing doesn't solve the
> distribution problem. Having a 1000 * 1 kg lumps of paper in a warehouse
> in the US doesn't do anything for people in the developing world. The
> distribution is the difficult challenge, on-line and off-line.

The system they were using could handle printing in different
localities and also fulfillment using paypal for a fee. There was
apparently an option to just have the title listed in amazon and get
them printed at point of sale so to speak.

cheers

~/julian