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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

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?

dwaite 3y ago
The 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 ago
  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.
  - zztop44 3y ago
    Isn’t that effectively almost exactly what Kickstarter does?
    - TylerE 3y ago
      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.
bombcar 3y ago
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.
- Cacti 3y ago
  You can easily print far, far smaller batches. That’s not the issue.
  - cpach 3y ago
    Are you saying it’s cheap to print and bind small batches of high-quality books with color photos?
  - dwaite 3y ago
    The article literally talks about how the printer had never seen a project like it before. If the small run costs the same as doing a 10,000 book run, it may have been easy to print but is likely not economical to sell.
    - glennfle 3y ago
      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.
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
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.

dwaite 3y ago

The 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 ago
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.
- zztop44 3y ago
  Isn’t that effectively almost exactly what Kickstarter does?
  - TylerE 3y ago
    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.

bombcar 3y ago

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.

Cacti 3y ago
You can easily print far, far smaller batches. That’s not the issue.
- cpach 3y ago
  Are you saying it’s cheap to print and bind small batches of high-quality books with color photos?
- dwaite 3y ago
  The article literally talks about how the printer had never seen a project like it before. If the small run costs the same as doing a 10,000 book run, it may have been easy to print but is likely not economical to sell.
  - glennfle 3y ago
    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.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago

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.