[Ambassadors] Re: Picture Book....

[Paul W. Frields]

On Fri, Jan 02, 2009 at 10:56:07AM -0600, Ian Weller wrote:
>  On Thu, Jan 01, 2009 at 11:35:17PM -0800, Doug Berry wrote:
>  > 4. The most economical option would be to go to
>  > the POD publishing source itself, which is Lightning 
>  > Source. They are the printer/distributor for
>  > most of the POD Publishers, including Lulu. The
>  > drawback here is that we would have to commit to
>  > publishing more than one book. If we use Lightning
>  > Source the base cost for the full color book would
>  > be $6.80 per book. We could sell it for $14.00, not
>  > an unreasonable price and make over $7.00 a book. Our
>  > costs would be $144.00 up front for their set-up costs.
>  > As you can see, we would only have to sell a couple 
>  > dozen books to recoup that cost.
>  > 
>  > 5. Perhaps, if we used Lightning Source we could do
>  > a Picture Book for each Fedora Release. "The people
>  > of Fedora 11," then use the same event photos, but 
>  > add pictures and bios of core developers, Red Hat
>  > people, other Project members, etc.
>  > 
>  Hmm. We were thinking about doing four books right from the start,
>  aligned with the four foundations -- "freedom, friends, features,
>  first", since we're going to try and get pictures of *everybody* at
>  FUDConF11 and fit most of them in somehow, plus pictures of people who
>  couldn't make it, provided by themselves or whatever.
>  
>  In unrelated ventures:
>  1. I talked to spot about the release forms, he'll speak with RH
>     Legal(tm)(R)(sm) about it.
>  2. Please don't use Scribd, it took me five minutes to register an
>     account through OpenID just to download the file in a form that
>     doesn't eat my browser alive :)  You can just attach PDFs to your
>     emails, I don't think the list scrubs them. 
Better than attaching PDFs to an email to thousands of people --
simply post it to your fedorapeople.org space.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedorapeople.org

We should try wherever possible to distribute information using
completely free and open source outlets.  Your fedorapeople.org
account is a great way to have large files available for fellow
contributors to download without clogging those email arteries!
(After all the holiday meals I appear to have artery clogging on the
brain.) :-)

>  I don't know about anyone else, but it seems like Lightning
> Source is
>  the way to go... I would like to see what Paul thinks about all of this,
>  so I'll bug him the next moment I see him on IRC. 
I've been mostly avoiding IRC over the holiday to spend more time with
my family during my break, but I'll be around more this weekend and
definitely Monday. :-)

It would behoove us to have someone serve as the lead for
this project, have that person get pre-orders up front through
whatever means work best (PayPal, for instance), and then use that
money to pay for the up-front costs.  I think that will be a good
indicator of the demand for the book(s).

It would be nice for people to be able to contribute other photos (and
releases) for cases where they aren't at an event to be photographed.

There is one large and lingering question, though, which is profit.
We have no place for that profit to reside here in the USA, and
probably won't for some time.  Perhaps this project should be
coordinated with Fedora EMEA so any profits can be devoted directly to
furthering Fedora activities there.  Or the proceeds could be donated
to a worthy global nonprofit like the FSF.  We'd need to make sure
that no matter what we do with any money, the full accounting process
is as transparent as possible.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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