Am I missing something here? I had some paperback instruction manuals printed up a decade ago. It wasn’t magic. Just color laser jet. Plastic coated paper covers. 80 sheets or so of B&W laser printed glossy paper. Thermal bonded spines. I didn’t think of it as book printing but for all intents and purposes that’s what it was.
I think the difference is that print-on-demand machines can make "perfect bound" copies using your own cover (the ERE book is an example of this) whereas thermal binding requires using a plasticy cover or spine. As far as I know print-on-demand machines have no upper limit on the number of pages (if they do, it's very high), whereas a "thermally spined" book can't get too thick before it risks coming apart. In terms of durability rankings, thermal spines are between spiral bound and perfect bound which in turn sit below stitched books. All this comes down to how many times the book is going to be read before pages start falling out.
For a limited run, it's possible to make your own press with a few pieces of wood and some wingnut bolts. When I looked into it, the estimated production time per book would have been 10-15 minutes.
Ahhh. The photos on Amazon are misleading. They have these thermal binding machines that look like they do perfect binding. Apparently these cheap machines need a special spine or covers + spine to work in their press. The press is slow. Looks like it takes a few minutes of heating and cooling. The results look like conference proceedings. Not really paperback quality.
The shop that did my manuals served the tech companies around Great America Parkway. They did instruction manuals, marketing materials, data books, annual reports and employee conduct manuals. The quality was like the typical manuals that come with software products. Come to think of it those pages do fall apart when you thumb through them too much.
Np. There are lots of places (besides Amazon) you can set up a paperback (or hardback, whatever) for print on Demand and only sell to yourself. A print run is cheaper, yes, but once the book is set-up, you can order more copies later. You can even update, etc. Maybe a combo of the two vendors would serve your purposes.
Ingramspark is one. New ones are popping up all the time.
I’d second the Kickstarter idea. They have the infrastructure and you could get it out to your most favored nation status people. You could also do all kinds of supplemental items if that sounds like fun. I think I’ve bought a dozen books or more on Kickstarter. It is one way to get the upfront funding for the print run.
I think a publishing deal would have made your crazy anyhow. “Here, take my IP, give me squat, and then mismanage it into the next decade” doesn’t sound like your style. Trad publishing is demanding all rights forever these days. It’s a raw deal.
Back on Chat GPT. I was trying to figure out the derivative of (X - X^1/2)/X^2 last night and I decided to check my work using Chat GPT. It got it completely wrong. I typed in where the error was and it apologized and corrected the error which was misquoting the quotient rule of differentiation and then it made an algebraic mistake. I corrected it three times and it gave three different answers and they all were wrong. I really have no idea how this machine works but I was originally under the impression it could solve simple math problems. Maybe it’s not good in this way.
It's a GIGO problem due to the input being based on "the average online enthusiast". It's more appropriate to think of it as regenerative AI than generative AI. Any errors are more blatant in specific problems like mathematics and less blatant (subject to a social version of Dunning Kruger) in more general and opinionated fields. Indeed, [regenerative] AI may even provide better answers than the random human in those cases.
For some questions, the best answer is given by the "wisdom of the crowd". For other questions, the best answer is given by "the smartest person in the room".
It gives you the right formulae and substitutes the values also but gives something else for the result calculation. You can just copy paste the equation in excel and get the calculation done.
I've decided to DIY it completely, similar to sclass's suggestion. I'm sticking to my decision to steer clear of social media and feeding the superweb. I can barely bring myself to return emails and post here. Boyle got under my skin more than I realized.
