Dear Squeakers,

I am pleased to announce that we have teamed up with a state-of-the-art
on-demand and short-run printer to bring you the first Squeak (or should I
say Blue-plane) specific publishing venture.

This way we'll be able to have always up-to-date printed manuals as well as
the ability to publish books-booklets-tutorials and anything else you name
it on-demand, including CD inserts.

This venture gives us the ability to publish any document from less than 10
copies up to any number of copies you like. You can even have your lecture
notes properly and professionally bound with a cover that you or we can
design, and with a proper ISBN (if you don't wish ISBN can be excluded). We
can and would like to add CDs with the relevant material.
All you need to do is to email or upload your camera-ready (or should I say
digital-printer ready) PDF file as the content and Photoshop or Illustrator
designed cover art to us. When you send us your material and when you update
the material we will ask you to compensate us for the setup charges of about
$25 and this will be the only cost to you. This is a charge we directly pass
on to our printers and has nothing to do with us.

So, what are you waiting for? Start writing these books, send them to us,
and in around 2 weeks receive the proof copy and if you are happy we can
announce it, and people can directly order from our site, or from Amazon,
FatBrain, etc.

We will not edit the books, and the copyright will be solely yours or you
will need to have the full permission to publish the material , and take the
full responsibility of publishing the content as well (you will need to
confirm all that in writing) . We have a right to accept or refuse although
we intend to publish anything about Squeak unless there is a copyright
violation, improper content (i.e. no naked pictures or rude words ;) ), etc.
in the material submitted.

Generous royalties between 15% to 25% of our selling price (wholesale price
for Amazon, etc.) will be paid to authors. If books by non-profit
organizations would be published (i.e. Squeak Foundation) or if you are an
educator and would like to organize your lecture notes to a printed volume
with or without a CD we we will only pass on our costs and expenses to such
persons and organizations. Your students can directly order from us through
our and/or your web site and download PDFs in advance if necessary to not to
miss anything while waiting for the order to arrive. Heck, we'll even
publish Java notes if you mention Squeak somewhere in the text :-)

A typical A4 or a standard technical book size 400 page book (6" x 9")
printed on 85 gms paper with 250 gms full color cover with a CD costs about
US$11- 12 if printed less than 50 copies. Amazon's cut on books is 55% so if
we determine the RRP of such a book as $39.95 this means we would need to
charge $17.97 to them for every book sold. However we could (and you can)
also sell this book (at up to 25% discount if you wish) from our (and your)
web site directly and this would actually increase our margin, therefore
royalty to the authors. The price and allowable discound will be dictated by
authors although in occasion we may need to discuss these with authors.

If you are interested, please contact me.

This is venture is currently only Squeak and "blue plane" focused however if
you have any other requests I'd be happy to discuss.

We are also starting to develop "almost shrink-wrap" software packaging and
delivery expertise (after all every issue of Squeak News is one "helluva"
software application developed in Squeak and should work out of the box on a
Mac, PC and Linux, and I was told the latest issues work out of the box in
OS/2 and FreeBSD as well!). If you would like to experiment with short-run
software publishing with or without printed manuals please contact me.

Cheers,

Tansel

Tansel Ersavas
Editor, Squeak News
http://www.squeaknews.com