On Sep 7, 9:35 am, The Historian wrote:
On Sep 7, 9:25 am, help bot wrote:





On Sep 7, 5:30 am, The Historian wrote:

The "Gray Book" of Benko columns had 254 pages. Just to photocopy that
at five cents a page would cost $12.70. Plus it had a basic cover and
perfect binding but no introduction, no index, no table of contents,
no pictures, no biography of Benko, no ISBN number and no barcode.

Nowadays, most bookstores will not accept a book for sales without an
ISBN number and a barcode.

Benko gave all of his lectures in bookstores? I doubt that. Anyway,
photocopying would have been around 2 cents a page with the tiniest
bit of shopping, and even a dork like you has got the ISBN thing
figured out. There is even something called "teh Google" which finds

http://booksjustbooks.com/bookreques...stestimate.asp

in about 15 seconds. That quotes $6.93/copy for 500 copies, $4.03 for
1000 copies, 8.5" by 11", 256 pages perfect bound, 1-color cover. And
that's with no shopping or anything.

I don't think the goal here was to make a collection of photocopies,
Paul.

Like, duh!

The Gray Book also did not have a very attractive appearance. My book
was created by scanning the original Chess Life articles with a very
high resolution 600 dpi scanner. It is also cheaper to produce as it
is mass produced.

However, it took a massive amount of work to get it done as every page
had to be re-formatted to get it onto 6x9.

If you just shrink the text from full size down to 6x9
it seems to me that everything will get smaller, more
difficult for oldsters like me to read. That is, unless
you are using a text-recognition program and doing
a complete reformat, which increases the number of
pages significantly.

So the question of whether
I will do volume 2 which would cover the years 1987 through 1993 will
depend on the success of this volume.

Why not print it at full size then. Sheesh.

Too easy. That would be like climbing Mt. Everest by
being dropped near the top via helicopter. OTOH, you
still need to get back down... scratch that analogy!

6 by 9 is a common size for books, Paul.

I don't understand the venom Mr. Sloan is drawing for his publishing
efforts. His chess books get attacked on the newsgroups without being
seen. I understand being leery of ordering one because of Sloan's
reputation, but he's publishing, or republishing, interesting titles
at reasonable prices.

I don't know, but aside from the negativity toward Mr.
Sloan himself there is the fact that these things are
just re-hashes of other people's work, where Mr. Sloan
gets his name on the cover as "editor", right?

I don't know. None of the posters in this thread have seen the book.



Has anyone purchased any of Sloan's chess books? I believe there's
another collection of endgames and a Weaver Adams title. Comments by
someone who has seen the books are welcome.

One of the things a self-publisher type can do is
get a print-on-demand service, which only cranks
out the books as needed. In that setup, if no books
sell you are not stuck with say, a thousand copies
which cost five bucks apiece to print. But the cost
is higher, so I would go with the normal, cheaper
method and just be a bit conservative in how many
you print.

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Neil,
Doesn't the USCF and CHess Life own those articles since they were
work for hire? If they do, then isn't Sloan in violation of copyright?

Rob