First off, I’d like to thank whoever purchased a print copy of Library 2.0: A Cites & Insights Reader yesterday. That’s the fourth copy (and first print copy) purchased.
It may also be nearly unique, depending on how Lulu’s production process actually works. That will be true even if 500 more copies sell (which seems likely to be off by about two orders of magnitude).
How so?
This book is not only a trial balloon for Cites & Insights Readers; it’s also a proof of concept for the Word template also being used for my next professionally-published book–a template that will wind up on my personal website for others to download.
But I uploaded and published the book on May 27–and since then, I’ve made some changes in the template based on discussions with the publisher and doing a triple-check of which typefaces are “standard” as of Windows 7 and Office 2010.
Namely, I found that while Office 2007 included a wide range of text typefaces, Office 2010 includes no typefaces beyond those supplied with Windows–and while Windows 7 has some excellent typefaces, the list doesn’t include Goudy Old Style, the text face in the template and the book.
After experimentation, the template now uses Palatino Linotype for text–and, rather than Calibri, Verdana for headings. Both are present on pretty much every Windows computer and, as Palatino rather than Palatino Linotype, on every Mac.
But that suggested another change: Palatino sets large, so that 11 pt. text on 13 pt. lines was bigger than it needed to be and had a little less interline spacing than we wanted. So we changed it to 10 pt. text on 13 pt. lines–and 10 pt. Palatino is about as large as 11 pt. Goudy Old Style.
So…
So I reformatted the book using the new version of the template, spent part of this morning making adjustments for vertical justification and bad breaks, and have now uploaded the new version and modified the available book.
Technically, the new book is one page longer, although the actual number of sheets doesn’t change (it’s 210 pp. instead of 209–or, rather, 206+iv instead of 205+iv). That means I get charged for one more print page, which reduces my net slightly–but it’s still slightly over the $4 target for C&I Readers, so the price remains $13.99.
(I also expanded the spine typesize, which was smaller than it should have been, and deleted some text on the back cover referring to ePub and Kindle versions, since those aren’t happening any time soon.)
Result: Same text, slightly different appearance.
The text is unchanged (except for the copyright page). The front cover is unchanged. The back cover and spine are slightly different. The pages all look different, since it’s entirely different typefaces.
Oh, there is one variance from the template used for my micropublishing book, the one that will become freely available:
The publisher I’m working with likes sans for block quotes, and that works fine for most books–which have very few block quotes. Library 2.0: A Cites & Insights Reader has loads of block quotes, way too much sans for my taste. So I did change that one style, just for this book, to use Palatino Linotype rather than Verdana.
So the thousands hundreds dozens of others who buy the print book from now on will see a slightly different book. One I still believe is a pretty good bargain, especially in its $5.99 PDF version (which, to be sure, also has the new typefaces).
