Doug Berry wrote:
First the downside:
2. Ordinary snapshots, taken at an event or FUDCON, would be totally unsuitable for such a book. Mainly because of quality, but also because of content. Web graphics, as many of you know, look fine at 72 DPI (dots per inch), which is the standard setting in the GIMP for web graphics. But picture book quality graphics, especially large visual images, start at 600 DPI. Many publishers now want 1200 DPI: and up.
Why do you make the assumption that we don't know to use GIMP? And we
are talking here about imported photos, not about newly created images.
3. Most high quality pictures (above 600 DPI) are staged. Meaning they are models (or ordinary people) being absolutely still. Any movement appears as a blur.
Yes, we don't have the perfect conditions, but knowing the goal is print
we can work a bit more on the photos.
4. The above means the pictures must be shot with a high quality camera. Cameras that will overcome movement are expensive.
Do you think we use our mobile phones to take photos? Most of the
cameras I saw used at the last FUDCon were DSLRs. Isn't this enough?
7. Taking all of this into account, the cost-driven price of such a book would probably be in the $25.00 dollar range and up, even as a paperback. Assuming there was a need to generate a profit from the book.
I don't remember seeing something about turning a profit.
The plus side:
Now, having said all that, I still think it would be doable. The main downside would be getting the high quality photographs we would need.
That would mean we would have to be selective in the photo-images we used. We could possibly use images from a FUDCON, but not all images. Maybe some could be cropped and be suitable, others could be dithered with, others still might pass right from the start. But we would probably need hundreds of photographs to get the few necessary.
We have over 600 photos made at the Brno FUDCon and a lot more of them
were left out: http://www.flickr.com/groups/fudconbrno/pool/ (and we
have not planned for a book)
However, there is a reliable test everyone can do to weed out the unsuitable pictures before they get submitted, meaning that whoever is selecting the photos for a book, would not be as swamped. This is a simple test that many printers use to determine photo quality for printed material. Take the photo, run it through a scanner, one that you can set the resolution and DPI values to at least 600 DPI. And you can play with these values somewhat. High quality scanners often allow you to dither with the photo. Now, don't look at the image on your computer screen, print it out and see what you get. Even a cheap ink jet printer (or better) will give you an idea of what the results will be.
How I can run trough a scanner my photos, they are already in a digital
format...
The actual packaging of the book is nothing. I or someone else could do that for nothing. There have been several books packaged using Scribus, an
up-stream open source package that was not part of F10, but easily added.
Scribus *is* part of Fedora, however, not part of the default install.
I for one would be interested in reading a bit about how Scribus can be
used to create such a book with it.
So, having said all that, please understand that I am not claiming to be the "be all and end all" of publishing or book packaging. In fact, I am probably somewhat behind the times and if anybody has a better idea or way, lets hear it. But I know enough to know that creating a quality book product depends on the quality of the material that makes up the book and not just the publishing or printing aspect.
Many of us lack the experience in printing, so advices are useful.
I have not even mentioned publishers, or printers. Today they are really just middlemen; publishers are quickly becoming book marketers and not book creators. They are still necessary, but are slowly becoming obsolete as the industry reels from innovation.
How about using something like lulu.com as a publisher? For example
http://www.lulu.com/en/products/photo_books/?cid=en_product_portal
So, perhaps we could do this as a start. Maybe we could get a couple hundred photos, from all over the planet and the Fedora community, and pass them around a committee. Everyone chooses the ones they like and we toss the rest. Then we could put the selected ones on-line and people could vote or something. For a 110 page book, with print quality photographs on the base pages and text on the back pages, we would need probably 50 or 60 good photographs. Double that with photos on the back pages.
A couple hundred photos is piece of cake, expect the next Boston FUDCon
to produce a few time more. For photos from Europe you may have to wait
for a while.
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