“The Less2022 Review § Cost of Book Production”, 2023-12-15 (; similar):
This number doesn’t seem to make any sense. You suggest making an ebook, and that should be most of the heavy effort handled if you can ever get to a point of reusing a previous year’s printing process. It’s not really clear to me how it can take that much time and/or effort.
Look, I also really thought this. And then we did it 3× and each time it took hundreds (and sometimes over a thousand) hours. I also had my inside-view violated, but I updated towards the outside-view after trying this 3× and each time finding it to be a quite massive endeavor with a lot of details.
[Ben Pace elaboration:]
I’m not certain entirely of the cause of it taking so much work. I will say that meeting the standard of “beautiful, professional book” requires all of the details to be okay. Here’s a quickly-generated list of possible details that can go wrong:
A resized image with blurry/unreadable text in it
Some misaligned text in the running header
Some misaligned text on the outer cover
Some of the text’s color being the wrong shade of gray/black
Misspelling someone’s username
Having the text no longer quite accurately describe the new versions of the images (never mind the work involved in re-making all the images to fit the reduced-for-cost color-scheme of the printed book)
Image color coming out differently in print relative to its appearance in Photoshop/InDesign
Fixing critical typos
Figuring out how to deal with text that only makes sense if you can click on the hyperlink
Ensuring there’s no duplicated paragraphs or short amounts of text that hangs over on a bare page on its own
Math/LaTeX needs to not look horrendous. Perhaps you need to make an image for it, and then you must ensure that it’s the same size font as the rest of the text.
A lot of stuff has to be re-checked every time you make a change (eg. “We’ve reduced the margin between the text and the outside of the page by a quarter of an inch in order to reduce the total number of pages and decrease cost. This means we need to do another visual check of ~1,000 pages to make sure nothing broke.”)
There’s a lot of low-level details that I need to get right so that it correctly fits in the category of ‘beautiful item made with love’ rather than ‘cheap Amazon self-published book’.
I think a book where we spent half the time on the details could end up being quite disappointing on net.
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