When I posted C&I Volume 7: Buy the book!” it was partly a leap of faith. Given past experience (and that I expected/expect fairly low sales, but thought a few libraries and people might spring for it), I didn’t wait for my own copy to arrive before opening it up for sale.
My copy arrived today. It looks great–with a couple mild caveats:
- As you can sort-of see if you look really closely at the small cover illustration, my attempt to blend the rest of the cover in with the sky color in the photo didn’t entirely work. There’s a band just above the picture and at the very top of the page that’s a little less greenish than either the sky in the picture or most of the upper part. Not sure how that happened, but I’m certainly not a CorelDraw expert (or Gimp expert, and don’t have enough use for photo-editing to spring for Adobe Elements). Let’s call it a feature rather than a flaw: A slight difference in decorative bands. (Hey, there’s still a little programmer/analyst in me…) On the other hand, the spine (type on that same background color) and back cover look great–the sign in front of Molokai Public Library against a partly-cloudy deep-blue and light-blue sky is, I think, a great shot.
- The book cover photos on page 1 of the April and October issues are grayscale because they had to be (I changed them before packaging up all the PDFs): You can’t have two color pages without having everything in color, which would be prohibitively expensive. The grayscale versions turn out very well, though.
- On my copy–but not necessarily anyone else’s–there are occasional signs that this is laser printing, that is, slightly irregular darkness at points. Not enough to be troublesome, or I’d ask for a replacement.
On the other hand: It is indeed bright-white 60lb. paper, the print is quite crisp, the margins are enough for the binding–and it makes the four Velobound and two tape-bound volumes look pretty sad by comparison. If there was any plausible reason to do so, I’d be tempted to try to put previous volumes out as paperbound books–they’re considerably easier to handle this way.
But given that zero sales volume, I can’t see any way to justify doing the work… Of course, it’s early yet.
Meanwhile, it looks great. And, to be sure, it’s the only way to get Cites on a Plane…
If you want it, it’s still $35, exclusively from Lulu.
Walt, I am having problems with your rss/xml news feeds. The links don’t work except for the comments only feed. The Entries RSS link is a dead link at feedburner. Is there a different link I can use for syndication? A client would like to include your posts on her website with links to the full articles on your website, but we need a working link to do so. Thank you.
I responded by email: I’ve tried different accounts, Bloglines, Google Reader, IE7’s direct RSS interface.
I cannot get the Feedburner feed to malfunction. It works properly in every case I tried.
So, whatever’s going on, I can’t fix it.