This is sorta like a how-to if someone wanted to take a stab at making bootleg Harry Potter books- turns out, as expected it’s a lot harder to make pirated books. For about $30,000 you could get a unscrupulous printer to make 10,000 copies of the 672 page Potter book. The author of the article called a bunch of places to get pricing and speculation on how this could be done. [via] Link.
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So why don’t we authors get more…. If it’s only a few bucks to print, we should all unite and strike for higher royalties!
In South East Asia, especially Vietnam and Laos, you get a lot of counterfeit copies of the Lonely Planet travel guides and whatever are the most popular tourist reads (Dan Brown and Rowling obviously). But they’re not classy counterfeits by any means: they take the book apart and photocopy it, colour photocopy the cover, and bind them as if proper books. I guess they create a few hundred copies. Clearly home made, hardly even an attempt to pass off as the original, but in some way, kind of in keeping with the Make ethos!
In a bookshop in Hanoi, I even saw a copy of the O’Reilly Camel book that had been duped like this.