[GRASSLIST:3547] Re: Book announcement: "Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach"

[Markus Neteler]

On Fri, Apr 19, 2002 at 12:53:35AM -0400, JWDougherty wrote:
> Markus,
> 
> I am interested in a book on GRASS.  I am a little confused about "presales" though.  If I understood correctly, the price is high but not yet fixed?  If more people express an interest the price will be lower?
> 
> Can you clarify the current asking-price for the book?
> 
> Thanks,
> JWDougherty

Of course: Since the GRASS community is (still) narrow, the publisher
does not expect to print thousands of pieces. So they will print a
few hundreds in the first printing, I do not know the exact number.
However, with few printed books the production costs are quite high. 
The more books are known to be sold ("presales"), the higher will be
the number of books for the first printing. As we are in a range of a
few hundreds books, even a small number of presaled books reduces the
production costs significantly.

The more books are known to be sold, the lower the final list price.
When we manage to organize presales of 100 books, we already gain a
reduction by 1/3 of the list price. Our interest as authors is to get
the price as low as possible (we don't will/want to become rich from that
book, but will re-invest into GRASS development). Only then the book
is affordable for a broader user community.

Scientific publishers often sell books quite costly, the organizing of
presales is our chance to significantly lower the production costs and
subsequently the list price.

Hopefully this clarifies our announcement,

best regards

 Markus Neteler