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print on demand

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• from: Conversation_with_Geoff_Cox (pad)

  print on demandIlan (00:44:43) ** Just to add something here, print-on-demand is one option, but what happens, when we do the printings, is that we do offset, we only change the cover, and then send the books to different countries with a marginal cost again. I mean, it's logistics, and shipping. So, offset is a technology that scales, right? So the more you print, the less it costs. So, the more partners you can find, the better the product can survive in their local markets.** Geoff (00:45:21) Yeah. Maybe this is an example of some of the problems, at least. With the aesthetic programming book, we wanted to translate it into Chinese. So, we decided to work with a collective, and we ended up working with a collective of people based in Taiwan. So, we were interested in translating into Chinese and all the problems of translation that are derived from working in a context like Taiwan, which has a particular colonial relationship to mainland China, also has lots of indigenous languages, and there are lots of debates about the use of classical Chinese. So, it gets really complicated immediately. We wanted that translation process to be something like thinking about forking: how do you fork into another, and how does that resonate with local politics? We immediately got into the suggestion that we would do this print on demand to make it cheap, to make some physical copies. Their print on demand hasn't really developed, so they wanted to print offset. So then you're immediately into a different set of economic difficulties of where to raise money and how to raise money. So this kind of cross-cultural translation, I think, is really interesting at the level of the content, but also at the level of the form that might take.