Let’s Publish a Coffee Table Book.

[lokisbong]

I would love to see even one of my 3 top ten pictures in a real printed book for sale even if I don’t make a penny on it this time. If I get in the book I will promise right now to buy one and probably a few more for my mom n dad.

Thank you Kestrana for getting this project back on the path to happening.

[staplermofo]

I have a stupid Chinese midterm today, and therapy, and work, then more work, then stupid doctors, then work again but I’ll try to crank out something this weekend in hopes of getting brighter minds rolling along.
*sob sob sob*

[Kestrana]

Cool, we don’t have any deadlines yet so as long as we just keep momentum going there’s not tons of rush.

[Kestrana]

Initial page count is much lower than we were estimating, so for right now in making dummy book chapters I’m taking the top 5 from each contest and we can determine a number of extra nominated pictures and how to conduct that nomination process at a later date.

On that note, anyone want to research the dimensions and page count of the average coffee table book?

[orionid]

There’s a bunch under the coffee table in the living room.

[Kestrana]

Touche

[lokisbong]

8.5 x 6.7x.7 150 pages

13.6 x 10.2 x 1.6 368 pages

17.2 x 14.2 x 1.2 253 pages

This was just three random books that claimed to be coffee table books. all measurements in ye olde inches.

[olavf]

I generally suck at wordsmithing but I might be able to talk Kat into some of that come August – she’s doing JulNoWriMo so I doubt she’d be you for more than the 1500 + words a day she is already writing… I can help with numbers or other stuff…just let me know.

last year I started assembling a spreadsheet for 2009 and could start doing something similar.

[Kestrana]

Ok well why don’t we talk about how we are going to decide which photos make the cut?

[sleeping]

I think the easiest way to get submissions would probably be by Farktographer rather than by contest – something along the lines of “you can submit any of your top 5 images that you’d want to see included plus any two images from your personal top 10 vote getters”. That would ensure that people would have some flexibility about what of theirs they wanted to see included, and would mean that people who hadn’t ever had something with a ton of votes could still get something included, but it would still give some weight to the general voting preferences…

[linguine]

I like the idea of doing the top 5 or 10 pictures from each contest, but I’m not sure how doable that idea would be. Top 10 would put us close to 3000 pictures depending on when we make the cutoff date for the book(250 or waiting for 300 seems like easy choices). A book this size would probably get really expensive and scare the publisher. Also we would run into problems with people not wanting to be in the book and not being able to track people down so we would either have a lot of contests with fewer photos or just go with the top 5 or 10 photos per contest of people that want to be in the book.

The other way I could see doing this is just say everyone that wants in the book gets in. Then we would have to decide if everyone gets the same number of entries or do we set the number of entries by something like vote totals or averages(or maybe come up with some formula that screws over everyone). As for picking photos we could let each person pick their own, have a committee to pick photos, or let people vote on which photos are used for each person(maybe letting the farktographer narrow the pool down to 10 or so photos before voting so everyone doesnt have to dig through everyones fsm profiles), although this last idea may be tough to get participation for everyones entries if 200 people decide they want to be in the book.

[SilverStag]

I think we might need to be more restrictive- down to the top 3, probably, if we use position in the results as a criterion. When I participated in the CaptureIndy project, there were juried selections, and a companion CD that had every photo entered in the contest.

[Kestrana]

The reason I see for using top X amount from each contest is because we need to have chapters or some sort of structure to the book otherwise it just becomes a hodgepodge of random images. Some of our best pictures only make sense in the context of the contest. But I also want to include everyone who wants to be included so taking the top 5 + or – 0 to 3 others from each contest (and dropping the Anniversary one entirely) puts us between 250-400 pictures which I think is reasonable to work with and definitely would fit within a 200 page limit.

I’m not onboard with everyone who wants in getting the same number of pictures. I only participated from September onward, so I feel I shouldn’t have the same representation as someone who played all year. And even though it feels like some people win all the time, looking at just the month of January there are only 2 people who had 2 pictures in the top 5 and no one with more than that. I think once we actually break out the whole year it will be pretty diverse.

Tell me what you guys think about this: I started a dummy draft today just playing with ideas and I divided up chapters by month. Then on the preface page for each chapter I listed the contests in that month and the t&d for each. The 1st place picture got its own page, the others were arranged 2 or 3 to a page depending how they fit. If for some reason there’s a picture that we don’t get rights to, we take 6th place or more group-selected pictures. Also at this time skipping pictures that depict family/friends (but not self-portraits at this time) since it was brought up earlier.

I like the idea of people nominating their favorite pictures and everyone kind of voting on them. I wonder if we could run a special farktography thread separate from the contest inviting people to submit 3 previously submitted pictures from 2009 and take the votes from there to decide what images make the cut? Everyone who posted would have at least 1 picture in the book, their highest voted picture no matter what standing and we can take the top X number of places depending on space left over? If we could link in the thread some sort of online permission slip for the rights to the picture that would probably also help us in finding some of those casual farktographers and getting their permission.

olavf What kind of information were you gathering with your spreadsheet?

[SilverStag]

Some more thoughts: Remember that the technical requirements for printing on paper in a book are way different that setting up an image for screen display on Fark or Flickr, in terms of resolution and gamma, etc. We’ll need to collect clean copies of images for inclusion.

We’ll have to do some sort of organizing, because some people win LOTS of contests, and some people haven’t yet won one. It seems a little unfair to shut someone out of the book because they haven’t placed well, and yet equally unfair to curtail someone’s participation because they get lots of votes every week. I’m not sure how to walk that tightrope.

[Kestrana]

Well the first thing to do would be to make a quick list of everyone who would be included automatically if we take the contests Top 5, and how many times. If someone has 60 pictures that fit in that maybe it’s excessive. I don’t want to exclude really good pictures though. But without that data we might be making a mountain out of a molehill but I really think the numbers break down is only going to reveal maybe a handful of people who have large numbers and a wider diversity than we think.

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