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RE: Guttenburg Book Store

Ben Rowland — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 17:55:28 GMT

We have a cartoon on one of our more troublesome printers at work with a dead monk on a scroll and someone yelling "Get tech support, the printer died again!"

That evokes strong memories of a cube job I had many years ago. My cube was right by the bathrooms. To add insult to injury, a printer was stationed right outside my cube. Now, in the entire two years I worked there, I never saw that printer actually function. There was a steady stream of IT support folks responding to trouble tickets and working in vain to repair it, and hapless co-workers who attempted to print to it. Now, for some reason, all of these folks assumed I was the expert on this particular printer merely because it was positioned right outside my cube. Each time, for two years, I explained to them that it had been broken since the moment I arrived on the job and had never functioned, and that I had no idea how to make it print.

RE: Guttenburg Book Store

BRodda — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 07:43:12 GMT

To many poeple in the iBook type design. They have been around for years and people just don't like them.

This is more like the "build your own CD" that FYE has. We get around hte whole DRM thing becasue printed books are not easliey copied and distributed. That's why publishers don't like e-books.

RE: Guttenburg Book Store

Ben Rowland — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 18:01:14 GMT

You are basically trying to do for books what Steve Jobs did for music, right? You might as well develop the iBook while you're at it!

RE: Guttenburg Book Store

BRodda — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 07:16:18 GMT

We will pay the current royalty fee based on the current format the book is available in. That way the publisher gets there cut, but doesn't have to pay the overhead of production, storage and shipping. At the end of every month we figure would send out checks and a list of the number of times the books were printed and in what format.

RE: Guttenburg Book Store

SwiftWalker — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 17:07:58 GMT

BRodda (2/28/2006)

We have a cartoon on one of our more troublesome printers at work with a dead monk on a scroll and someone yelling "Get tech support, the printer died again!"

Seriously though; anyone think there is a market for something like this. Nice small footprint and a cafe to sip coffee at while waiting for you book to print.

Tough sell, IMO. There are copyright issues to contend with. Does your machine keep track of the number of times a book is printed so the author/publishing house can get his cut? What if a print goes haywire and the job needs to be done again? Should the messed up copy be kept (or sent to the publisher) in order to prove that there hasn't been a copyright infringement?

RE: Guttenburg Book Store

BRodda — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 13:12:56 GMT

We have a cartoon on one of our more troublesome printers at work with a dead monk on a scroll and someone yelling "Get tech support, the printer died again!"

Seriously though; anyone think there is a market for something like this. Nice small footprint and a cafe to sip coffee at while waiting for you book to print.

RE: Guttenburg Book Store

SwiftWalker — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 10:19:13 GMT

I think you might get more mileage out of a "Irish Monks Bookstore," where you would employ 6th century Irish monks to handwrite copies of books for your customers. Sure, it takes longer, but you could charge more for the novelty and make up the difference in volume.

The problem is finding enough 6th century Irish monks, I suppose.

RE: Guttenburg Book Store

BRodda — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 07:16:56 GMT

That is a boutique publishing house. You give them a book and they will do a small run print of it. I used to work at a bookstore so I know all about these special order houses. It takes months for them to do a second printing. They are good if you want 500 copies of the book you wrote printed, but they are not quite what I'm talking about. I'm talking more about if you need a copy of "Lord of the Flies" for a book report and need a copy. It's amazing how hard it is to stock books for summer reading for students. The reading lists for all the grades for 6 schools took up a binder 3 inches thick.

RE: Guttenburg Book Store

Ben Rowland — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 17:23:28 GMT

Ah. Check out lulu.com for an interesting (and similar) business.

Ben

Guttenburg Book Store

BRodda — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 09:57:41 GMT

Well it's Monday again, so I'm trying to keep up with the one company idea a week.

I hope people are finding this entertaining at the least.

Project Name: Guttenburg Book Store

Project Description: The Gutenberg books Store is a print on demand book store. They keep soft copies of books in an adjustable format and can print on demand any book in their library in any format (Hardcover, Quality Paperback or Mass Market) in any size font.

This removes the messy inventory process as well as the shipping, stocking and other overhead nightmares that most conventional bookstores have to deal with. It also means that if you want the "Davinci Code" in a form you can read and carry easily you can have it. It will also allow for printing books in various languages as well as in large print.

Problem: While there are a plethora of public domain books that would allow you a massive back catalog the deals that would have to be made with large scale publishers is out of my realm of expetese.