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How we crowdfunded $750k for a giant book about keyboard history
- gumby 3y agoHope it has a KTV and its descendant the space cadet keyboards. TTTT the space cadet was too mushy for me, but the 70s keyboards of the KTV (and most of the keyboards of that era) had perfect key travel and solid metal base plates. Selectric was great too; shame about eh PC keyboards which were OK but inferior.
- pushcx 3y agoI don’t see KTV in the index (or Knight TV), but the space cadet keyboard has a lovely photo spread and two pages describing its effect on vi and emacs, its many modifiers and math keys, and some other facts. There’s two other small mentions; a pair of photos comparing its depth to an thin Apple Magic Keyboard and a homebrew keyboard inspired by it. I took a flyer on this kickstarter and I’m really impressed by the results. It’s a beautiful labor of love. Incredible design and detail.
- gumby 3y agoEmacs was developed on the KTV in TECO on ITS, and the space cadet keyboard was only on the lisp machine. How did the latter affect vi, which ran on different hardware and has a different model? Or Emacs, really? I wrote an awful lot of code using it but as I said it was unfortunately spongy.
- 101008 3y agoConsidering that all that information could be accessible in an easier way online (and with better resolution), a book doesn't make much sense. They are heavy, you can't copy/paste, you can't zoom on the images, you can't share it easily... however, they are beautiful. I hope people keep making books for years - not only this kind of books (that are beautiful), but also paperbacks, etc. Books are a beauty on themselves, even if they are not the best format for some purposes. I guess, however, we are going into a future that resonates with a quote from HBO's The Newsroom, that says that books are the new form of art. They will soon be like paintings.
- Solvency 3y agoWhat would be really cool is if all of this information was readily formatted and readable on something like Wikipedia, with all of the sourced images, and then people could "print" their own personal book copies through a great printer. I can already order custom books for my toddler with his name woven into the books illustrations from places like Uncommon Goods. It sucks there is no inbetween from <send webpage to desktop printers> and <buy a niche book that needed $750k in crowd funding to even exist>. I'd love to be able to ship myself beautifully printed and bound books on all sorts of free information.
- TylerE 3y agoThe original kickstarter was for $150k, not $750k. They went way past what their minimum target was. The issue with doing print on demand is that it basically limits you to doing industrial inkjet printing. “Real” offset printing will produce a sharper, higher quality result, and is more amenable to using nicer paper stock too.
- criddell 3y agoA book makes sense because lots of people want a book. Sounds like they are planning an ebook version as well, so that solves some of your problems with the format.
- saucymew 3y agoYou bring up good points against the physical medium (especially when it comes to note-taking), but I'd respectfully disagree. Books I've read multiple times, the great ones, nothing beats a well-made physical edition. The way light pushes off the pages, that smell...the book changes over time as you read it more. It almost takes on a life of its own with yours. And, if you need to be completely offline or Amazon decides to one day Google-drop your entire online library, that book will still be open to you. Great work deserves to be supported. Buying a physical copy is my small way to show my support.
- eviks 3y agoYou can smell another book while reading an ebook, and those are readable offline
- sunpazed 3y agoA coffee table book about Keyboards that is also a functioning Keyboard /s
- glennfle 3y ago(we did talk at one point about incorporating a working keyboard into the book and decided it was madness on top of the complexity of a book this big)
- unobatbayar 3y agoThe memory game is more enjoyable and less challenging than it may initially appear. https://shifthappens.site/#test-keyboard-layout-knowledge https://shifthappens.site/#test-keyboard-layout-knowledge
- wcunning 3y agoOne of the more interesting bits (as one of the backers, staring at my copy on the shelf now), is that the author asked for pictures of the book once you got it, and just the ones he's been comfortable posting in the updates are amazing. People's whole collection of antique computer history with the book open to the page about it, or propped up on a typewriter, etc. I sent one of my Model M, Unicomp, Thinkpad portable keyboard, Ergodox and recent dactyl manuform with the book.
- rvba 3y agoHow is the quality of the actual writing inside the book? I suspect high - looking at the supplementary text, but everyone seems to judge this book by its cover
- wcunning 3y agoPretty high, though I have only been skimming. It's kind of a coffee table book for me, since the part I really care about (modern keyboard cambrian explosion) is very short and way at the very end. I did read the entire small booklet "The Day Return Became Enter" and that was wonderful.
- serial_dev 3y agoIt 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?
- dwaite 3y agoThe setup cost and batch size are likely both too large to justify it without a large number of prepaid orders. It might actually be easiest to run such a second printing as a second kickstarter campaign.
- TylerE 3y agoNo 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.
- zztop44 3y agoIsn’t that effectively almost exactly what Kickstarter does?
- TylerE 3y agoIt’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.
- bombcar 3y agoA 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.
- bruce511 3y agoOne item that interested me was the tax issue he raised - getting income in one year, and having to pay tax on that, but then expenses in the following year. In my jurisdiction this is known as future-income, and essentially in year 1 a simple accounting provision is made (hence reducing profit in year 1) which has the effect of moving the revenue into the year where the order is fulfilled. This is especially true for subscription revenue where "annual amounts" are almost always falling into 2 financial years. This is enormously important from a refunds point of view - it's hard to give out refunds if the tax has gobbled 30% of the amount collected. From the article he's suggesting this practice is not universal? Which somewhat surprises me...
- Throw83994 3y agoMany jurisdictions do not allow this sort of deferals for cheating. Problem is with kickstarter, they should structure this thing as a loan, that gets written off by delivering or failing.
- Cacti 3y agoyou want to make kickstarter an international bank?
- actionfromafar 3y agoThey sort of are already, no?
- jimnotgym 3y agoOn the contrary, most places enforce this kind of 'deferral' (the accruals concept) to stop cheating. Imagine i took all of the cost first and the revenue later. I could offset the loss from this against my other income (which is taxed at source) and get a refund out of the tax authorities! It would be like an interest free loan!
- bruce511 3y agoIt's also enforced here to keep reports of profits sane. If I report revenue as profit (without adjusting for future expense) then I'm artificially reporting "higher profit than what actually happened." This artificially boosts share prices, and other things, which can have unfortunate effects downstream. Take Worldcom. They defered expenses (by capitalising the phone bill to be depreciated in future years) thus boosting reported profits. With, um, unfortunate results. So yeah, in my jurisdiction its enforced. But I can imagine that in other places its not, or revenue is taxed, or whatever.
- ddrmaxgt37 3y agoI just received my copy. Truly one of the best books in my collection. I’m looking forward to years of enjoyment.
- supersrdjan 3y agoIn regard to determining pledges/pricing tiers. Rather than go by a few universal rules of thumb, it might be better to look into what people had been prepared to pay in the past for crowd-funding projects similar to yours. A few years ago I helped a friend raise 300k on Kickstarter for a board game project. One thing I did was scrape (gently) pledge and backer data from ~100 or so projects that seemed to cater to the same kind of gamer he wanted to attract. Then I plotted to see which pricing range tended to bring in the most revenue. It's still a judgement call in the end, because each project is unique, but at least you're not shooting in the dark.
- boltzmann-brain 3y agoThis is an extremely good example of why any market research is infinitely better than no market research. It can inform product, technology, budget, and business. Speaking of research, I'd love to know if anyone's ever done any research into why tabs nowadays almost universally expand to 4 or 8 spaces. Why haven't 5/10 spaces won out? Why not 3/6/9? Why is it powers of 2? It would seem like counting to 8 isn't much more difficult than counting to 10 or to 6. Each of them use less than 4 bits, which is a typical minimal cell of information even in the most primitive computers, if you look at right after the primordial stone age of holding one bit per tube or per magnet. Early terminals - and the typewriters they were converted out of - did not have tabulation fixed to these amounts. Early code editors did not seem to have such tabstops either. So what gives? Did at some point everyone sit down and decide that tabs were 4 spaces, like in some sort of UN meeting? I've been trying to get an answer for this for years. Maybe decades. A good answer still eludes me.
- rvba 3y agoMaybe look into the number of characters that can be shown in a line. With 5/10 tabs and 80 chars per line you need to break code into two lines more often than with 4/8. Although modern mobitors and resolutions are huge, so you could have 200 character lines. But arent they harder to read than shorter lines?
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- lofaszvanitt 3y agoHope they release an epub once the campaing winds down/get their pocket money.
- thirdreplicator 3y agoHehe. That's lifetime funding if you go buy some Bitcoin.
- Siecje 3y agoDoes anyone make a keyboard where the caps lock button stays down so you know what state it's in?
- epcoa 3y agoThe short answer, no. The state of Caps Lock is entirely in host software, to the keyboard it is just another key. To get what you’re looking would require some very expensive mechanical contraption to reflect the state of the LED. And then what if you have reassigned Caps Lock, as is common? As cool as it might look it’s going to be a very limited niche.
- kps 3y agoUSB HID does have codes for locking versions of Caps Lock, Num Lock, and Scroll Lock¹. OS X might support these, given that older Mac keyboards had locking Caps Lock. Linux doesn't². ¹ https://www.usb.org/document-library/hid-usage-tables-15 https://www.usb.org/document-library/hid-usage-tables-15 ² https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v6.7.3/source/drivers/hid/hid-input.c#L36 https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v6.7.3/source/drivers/hid/h...
- epcoa 3y agoHaving written USB HID code for barcode scanners where this came up (thrilling I know). None of the major OSes support it including OS X. It’s sort of a homage to a historical artifact (that table dates to the early 90s) but useless because even if you use those old keyboards you will have to emulate with the usual scan code.
- growingkittens 3y agoBarcode scanners are cool. I'm working on setting up a barcode system for my personal library and then probably home inventory. Do you have any recommendations? I found 4 used scanners for cheap (Datalogic Gryphon GD4400).
- Tycho 3y agoI would like a giant book about virtual worlds in games. Games that have a free-roaming element. So things like Zelda: OOT as well as full blown open world games like GTA V. There's so much work that went into them, and also so much collective human memory of time spent immersed in those worlds. Wish someone would crowdfund that.
- famahar 3y agoIt's not at the same scale but I recommend the zine called Heterotopias. https://heterotopias.itch.io/ https://heterotopias.itch.io/
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- krono 3y agoIf you're familiar with the sandbox mmo EVE Online you might like Empires of EVE. They're very well put together and very thorough historical accounts of some massive and long term player driven content/conflicts throughout the history of the game. It was so much fun to read about why my side's leadership made certain decisions and about the other sides' perspectives of some of the space wars I was part of when I still played. https://www.empiresofeve.com/ https://www.empiresofeve.com/
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoOh man, I'd really like a copy of that and I see they have a sale on ($40 for both hardcover volumes), but then... $50 for international shipping is a bit steep.
- manuelmoreale 3y agoI know this is definitely not what you’re talking about because it’s a website and not a book but it’s a link always worth sharing https://noclip.website/ https://noclip.website/
- newaccount74 3y ago
- glennfle 3y agoThank you for these amazing comments and insight! One element I might not have emphasized as much in the linked piece is just how much of "team" you accidentally assemble. I project managed this for Marcin, but he hired other folks (proofreader and indexer) and commissioned some photography and 3D illustration. But beyond that, likely 100 people across our printer, the outside bindery (which did the hardcover binding), and the slipcase maker (an intensely handmade product as much as flawless as it might seem) were involved in bringing it to life. Then the many 1,000s or 10,000s of people who handled the books across the shipping process in the USPS and worldwide. Lots of people involved whenever you start working with pesky atoms.
- fennecbutt 3y agoI mean I've got one on arcade pixel based font design. Don't underestimate the market for a niche book/thing where the fans involved are nuts for it