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Comment by jen729w | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any idea how much it costs to lay out, print, and distribute a 200+ page book?

Hint: somewhere in the region of $100.

Get yourself a PDF if you want. A PDF isn’t a book.

Ive purchased many books containing material that is out of copyright, most recently a compendium of Lovecraft's works. It can be done extreemly cheaply. Such books tend to be of horrible print quality. I would need to see loads more photos, and independant reviews, to even consider dropping 100+ on such a book.

> It can be done extreemly cheaply.

I’m sure they’re beautiful books.

I have a copy of this from the original Kickstarter, and it’s a gorgeous book. Very high quality, very well done.

Me too, I also have the Apollo mission plans they had on Kickstarter. They're soooo nice

To be fair, the book is just a scanned copy of the original spiral bound book.

> Do you have any idea how much it costs to lay out, print, and distribute a 200+ page book?

Are you saying that a vast majority of 200+ page books are sold at a huge loss? Because I've bought many 200+ page books and never paid $100

I work in the printing industry currently. A book such as this which has to take into consideration impeccable color accuracy (most likely using a Pantone printing process), high-quality photo printing, hard-covered, and bound to last a long time can absolutely be VERY expensive to produce, especially if they are not being produced at a factory-level scale and are viewed as collectibles.

Why would they need to lay it out? NASA already did that. In any case, it doesn't cost 100 bucks to print a book, that's absurd. The longest Harry Potter books have 700+ pages and they don't cost hundreds.

A facsimile of a NASA design manual that’s fifty years out of date must be considered a geek’s edition, and the geek’s editions of Harry Potter novels do cost hundreds: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/harry-potter-and-the-prisoner-...

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