[sdiy] From Bernie of Electronotes

[KA4HJH]

I think we can safely assume that a print run is never going to happen. Aside from the fact that Bernie already has piles of photocopies, does anyone here realize how much a short print run would cost? A plate has to be made for every page. Then there's the cost of setting up each plate for a small offset press. OK, what if only the BG and PCC were printed–how many pages is that? Insanely expensive for such a low-demand publication. The only good thing is that the plates could be burned directly from printed pages. No scanning etc.

Medium volume inkjet printing or print-on-demand? Much cheaper but all those pages would still have to scanned, printed, collated, and then drilled or bound. $-$-$

And if there were a digital version some joker would  _buy_  a copy,, crack it, and put it on The Pirate Bay less than a week after it was published. Who wants to digitize thousands of pages just to have torrents freely available everywhere a month later?

Because EN consists of punched pages in a three ring binder it can lay flat. I highly prefer having the printed copy lying open on the table while I'm plugging stuff into a solderless breadboard. EN is exactly the sort of document I would want in this form so I can flip the pages back and forth rapidly. Ebooks are fine for novels and history but EN? Not my cup of tea.

All that having been said, there is one thing that would useful for everyone: an index. That would still require a raw scan/OCR of everything.


Terry Bowman, KA4HJH
"The Mac Doctor"