Hey Guys,
I think Ian, Jack, and Lisa, and all the others, have come up with a great
idea. A Fedora coffee table book would be a great visual aide as well as a
great keepsake for the Fedora community. Pictures from all over the world would
demonstrate the diversity of the Fedora community, like nothing else.
I am a book packager and author. I have put together several books, both my own
and for others, and I think I have a fair understanding of what might entail
with putting together a coffee table book. So let me chime in as follows.
First the downside:
1. Coffee table books, or any picture book, are the most expensive books to create and
publish, going. The "4-color" offset process means four plates for every image
or picture.
2. Ordinary snapshots, taken at an event or FUDCON, would be totally unsuitable
for such a book. Mainly because of quality, but also because of content. Web
graphics, as many of you know, look fine at 72 DPI (dots per inch), which is
the standard setting in the GIMP for web graphics. But picture book quality
graphics, especially large visual images, start at 600 DPI. Many publishers now
want 1200 DPI: and up.
3. Most high quality pictures (above 600 DPI) are staged. Meaning they are
models (or ordinary people) being absolutely still. Any movement appears as a
blur.
4. The above means the pictures must be shot with a high quality camera.
Cameras that will overcome movement are expensive.
5. Such books usually use high quality and thus, more expensive paper suitable
for photo images (and water-proof), adding to the end price of the book.
6. Binding for such a book, is usually stitched. Perfect Bound, clumps of
folded pages glued together, the most inexpensive binding going, would need a
larger amount of pages, usually above 130 before they will hold together.
7. Taking all of this into account, the cost-driven price of such a book would
probably be in the $25.00 dollar range and up, even as a paperback. Assuming
there was a need to generate a profit from the book.
8. Coffee table books are usually larger, 11 x 16, or something. The size will
determine the photographs used and will establish a quality goal for them. A 6
x 8 photo may look good at that size, but scale it up to say 12 x 16 and it may
be unsuitable. An old rule of thumb is to scan photos instead of scaling them.
Scaling is one-dimensional; scanning allows you options.
The plus side:
Now, having said all that, I still think it would be doable. The main downside would be getting the high quality photographs we would need.
That would mean we would have to be selective in the photo-images we used. We could possibly use images from a FUDCON, but not all images. Maybe some could be cropped and be suitable, others could be dithered with, others still might pass right from the start. But we would probably need hundreds of photographs to get the few necessary.
That means that having hundreds of people sending in stacks of photos, is probably not going to work. A photo has to be chosen according to its print quality and not just "cool" content. As much as we would all like to have a copy of that photo showing Paul Fields shoving Bill Gates off a cliff, if it does not print well it would not make the book.
However, there is a reliable test everyone can do to weed out the unsuitable pictures before they get submitted, meaning that whoever is selecting the photos for a book, would not be as swamped. This is a simple test that many printers use to determine photo quality for printed material. Take the photo, run it through a scanner, one that you can set the resolution and DPI values to at least 600 DPI. And you can play with these values somewhat. High quality scanners often allow you to dither with the photo. Now, don't look at the image on your computer screen, print it out and see what you get. Even a cheap ink jet printer (or better) will give you an idea of what the results will be.
The actual packaging of the book is nothing. I or someone else could do that for nothing. There have been several books packaged using Scribus, an
up-stream open source package that was not part of F10, but easily added.
So, having said all that, please understand that I am not claiming to be the "be all
and end all" of publishing or book packaging. In fact, I am probably somewhat behind
the times and if anybody has a better idea or way, lets hear it. But I know enough to
know that creating a quality book product depends on the quality of the material that
makes up the book and not just the publishing or printing aspect.
I have not even mentioned publishers, or printers. Today they are really just
middlemen; publishers are quickly becoming book marketers and not book
creators. They are still necessary, but are slowly becoming obsolete as the
industry reels from innovation.
So, perhaps we could do this as a start. Maybe we could get a couple hundred
photos, from all over the planet and the Fedora community, and pass them around
a committee. Everyone chooses the ones they like and we toss the rest. Then we
could put the selected ones on-line and people could vote or something. For a
110 page book, with print quality photographs on the base pages and text on the
back pages, we would need probably 50 or 60 good photographs. Double that with
photos on the back pages.
So, what do say you? Anyone want to take a shot at this?
-- w Douglas Berry --
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