There are four handsome trade paperback editions from Lulu.com, each with a cover by a different artist, all priced at $14.50, and there is also the hardcover limited edition of the book for $275.
Rudy Rucker
(ISBN: 978-0-557-94307-4)
[Buy in Australia/New Zealand]
Frank Wu
(ISBN: 978-0-557-94306-7)
[Buy in Australia/New Zealand]
Rick Lieder
(ISBN: 978-0-557-94308-1)
[Buy in Australia/New Zealand]
Pablo Defendini
(ISBN 978-0-557-94305-0)
[Buy in Australia/New Zealand]
The hardcover limited edition of the book …
These are hand-bound at the Wyvern Bindery in Clerkenwell, London, and printed by Oldacres of Hatton Garden. Each book has original paper ephemera (see Flickr set) donated by various writer friends to the project, and comes with a SD card bearing the full text of the book as well as the full audiobook.
Worldwide airmail shipping from the UK is included. For two-day FedEx shipping, please add $75.
Availability: I have 20 books in stock at present.
Remember:
You can also donate a copy to a school, library or other worthy institution (if you’re at such an institution, please consider registering for such a donation.
There are numerous font-related misprints in by paperback. Also, the print on a couple of pages is very faint. This is not a professional quality print run. I liked the stories but the physical package was a Big Turnoff!
Can you clarify, Robert — which misprints did you see? Which pages were problematic? I’d like to know if this was a one-off or a consistent problem.
Hi Cory,
Just so we are clear: I loved the stories. Some are better than others, but there a definitely some keepers in this collection!
I loved the cover art and the idea of multiple covers. I was thrilled and enthuzed by the publishing experiment. Some these comments are coming from a fan. I chose to post rather than send an email with the hope that if the print problem is wide spread, others would chime in and help fix the problem.
OK now the details. I have Rick Leider softcover. There are 2 issues with the printing
1) page 58 is very very faint, barely readable. It’s the only page where this occurs, so my guess is that this is a sporadic problem with the Lulu printers.
2) the more serious problem is font related. Here is one example. Power Punctiation story, Page 189, last paragraph. I see
“He was reading the papers before putting them into the shredder! What are you doing? I said, you aren,”A^ot allowed to do that!”
So instead of the apostrophe I see 3 characters: a comma, followed by a capital A with an umlaut, and a lower case o with a circumflex!
I’ve seen similar artifacts in emails, where extended font encodings are rendered in a funny way by text-based clients.
The funny accented characters occur numerous times in the book, on the order of 1 dozen times.
Here is another instance, on page 206, line 18. I see
“… I thought you were na**ve enough to do the job…”
where ** is a square root radical followed by the empty-set symbol (no kidding!)
I am guessing a Naïve with the accented i was supposed to go there, and the accented letter was typeset incorrectly
It’s a font issue of some kind
This is just a couple of the mistakes. I didn’t think to mark them down during my reading, but they are pretty easy to spot. It’s always funny characters that don’t belong in a fiction narrative.
These mistakes with the funny characters are surprising irritating. I hope you can work this out. Good luck with the self-publishing effort and with all of your creative work in general.
Thanks, Robert! The p58 issue turned out to be my idiocy — I fat-fingered a setting in InDesign that hosed that page. It’s fixed now — my apologies.
The punctuation issues you list all look like they got fixed in December, according to the changelog — did you order your copy a long time ago?
Yes, I ordered it the week you announced it. I didn’t know you had a changelog! Makes sense; I will look for it next time. No need to apologize — just keep it coming.
I’m not sure if this is the right place for this, but here goes. I bought a copy through Amazon (I’m hopelessly old school). Before I was even halfway through the plastic film started peeling away from the cover. Is this supposed to be a temporary protective film, like the one covering the screen of a new cell phone? Or is the book just badly made? It’s driving me nuts, like a scab that you want to pick at. I’d like to just rip it off, but I don’t want to harm the book.
Absolutely not — if it’s delaminating you should contact Amazon for a replacement. Please let me know if they don’t get you one promptly.
Thanks. I’ll let you know what happens.
Just to close the loop, I returned the defective book through Amazon’s return process. Got a new copy in five days, which is pretty good turnaround. The cover appears to be in one piece, but it took a few days for the peeling to start on the first one. I’ll let you know if it happens again.
That’s great news, Colin. Glad to hear it.
The hardcover version is -so- cool! If you could do something of similar awesomeness at a slightly more affordable level I would love to buy it. Like, in the sub-$100 range. I love the SD card embedded in the cover. Was that an original idea, or something that the binder offered as a service?
It was an original idea!