It might be a naive question, but why don't they just keep printing the book, if it was a hit?
There is a section on the website that says: "The book is almost sold out. A small remainder of books will be available to order in late 2023 or early 2024"
I was looking for some beautiful books about technology, so I'd love to buy the book, but I can't, and now I have to hope that I won't miss that email.
Or is it just a sales tactic like booking.com's "there is only one room left" banners?
A book like this is likely not print on demand, and the cost to do another run is high enough compared to rate of sales that it’s not directly worth the risk.
You have to make 10k books at a time and warehouse them, for example. Selling 100 a year wouldn’t cut it.
This feels like a perfect use case for a RFP marketplace that I think the world desperately needs - and then perhaps there can be a few individuals or organizations who would do such small orders, and maybe that's all they do - and they get enough work where it's probably not as cheap as mass printing 10,000 but at least it could get done and at a reasonable price; maybe with a "by donation" option for individuals who feel compelled or able to support the manufacturer even further.
It would be difficult to manage the quality. That's OK if the price reflects the quality, but if I'm to spend €100 (say) on a large photo book like this I don't want thin paper, imprecise binding, or other corners cut.
It's likely that you have a weird situation where making ten books costs about the same as making a thousand, because ten would have to be done via quite expensive printers and a bunch of hand setting, but a thousand is done via complex machines that once setup, are relatively cheap to run.
As an aside, print-on-demand from Amazon and others has been pretty amazing for black and white text, if you quality check it, but it quickly goes sideways for hardback color books.
People have even reported bad printing on simple text, but it's not clear if that's bad files (as the user, you have quite the leeway in what you send them).
Indeed, you'd have to have very clear specifications and perhaps sample prints that can be ordered to get samples of various qualities available; and then public review/rating system would be necessary for people to build up cred.
Project manager and editor of the book here! Marcin has posted a lot of updates and newsletters about the printing process. It was fairly arduous to get the quality for the print run we did. Marcin hasn't disclosed the total, but you can tell through the Kickstarter campaign it was at least 4,500. Each of the book set’s hardcover volumes comprise 38 large sheets of paper printed on both sides, then 10 for the softcover volume 3, then sheets for the endpapers and covers and slipcase. Each of those sheets takes from an hour or two to much longer with the degree of attention we paid.
We spent about 100 hours on press with the printers across about eight days, sometimes 12 to 14 hours a day in July with 80°Fs and 90°Fs outside (the printing plant is conditioned somewhat for heat and humidity, and sometimes we had to stop printing for the day as it was just too hot).
It was glorious and exhausting. But we were almost at our physical limits for overseeing the print run and our printers were close to their ability to simply house the raw, printed, and then bound materials. This is an intensely physical object to its scale and the number of pieces.
Ok that’s a fair point. You can still do small batch, but I agree, the results wouldn’t be anymore more than what you’d get from a laser printer and a glue binding.
No need to actually do KS, just organize it as a group buy: If enough people commit and put down a deposit, the run is funded and it happens. If not just unwind it.
It’s a fundamentally different problem because you’re not, from either side really, worried about the classic Kickstarter “funds raised but we can’t keep our promises” issue. You probably already have a working relationship with a print house, print ready source files, and on the financial side you probably know exactly what all your cost basis is, e.g. setup costs of $x, $y printing costs per copy and fulfillment costs of $z. Kickstarter’s fees aren’t nothing.
As others have said, these things take a lot of upfront cost, so they have to be done in batches. Actually there's quite a lot of products that are done this way, I would argue pretty much anything that takes "pre-orders" for a long time instead of "order now and get yours in a day or two", for example the Playdate console.
There is a section on the website that says: "The book is almost sold out. A small remainder of books will be available to order in late 2023 or early 2024"
I was looking for some beautiful books about technology, so I'd love to buy the book, but I can't, and now I have to hope that I won't miss that email.
Or is it just a sales tactic like booking.com's "there is only one room left" banners?