III
NYTimes to redesign by 2008. They're also closing a printing plant and removing 250 jobs in the process of saving $42 million a year. So continues the slow shaving away of the analog newspaper industry.

An overwhelming collection of publishing statistics.

While many are quite dated, it's still an interesting read.

"2002: 10,000 new publishing companies were established." A statistics of which we are a part of.

My favorite stats on small publishers:

5. They've published an average of 7 titles each.

6. In 1997, they earned an average of $420,000.

7. Half of the high income small publishers earned over $1 million in 1997 working out of home offices.

12. They produce 4X as many nonfiction titles as fiction titles. Juvenile and poetry are the most popular fiction genres. Self-help, how-to and business lead in the nonfiction categories.

18. On average, they pay $465.17 for a simple cover design to as much as $3,533.26 for a complex cover design. Typical cover costs range $450 to $3,000.

22. It takes an average of 531 hours to produce a book-422 hours for fiction, 550 hours for nonfiction.

24. An average of 10 to 15 hours are spent designing a book cover.

25. On average, 61 hours are spent in the editing process.

26. On average, 29 hours are spent producing a news release for a new book.

28. Graphic design consumes 13.5% of the budget for fiction titles and 3.7% of the budget for nonfiction titles.

And finally just a quick thought on this monster of a book:
Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach. It's 1600 pages (!) and retails for $64.99 (on Amazon, so, perhaps $70+ in "real" stores). If anything screams to me "Release me as a PDF" it's a 1600 page technical manual. I know tech books run expensive but I can't help but think they'd do well to sell a price-adjusted PDF of this beast. Then again, there ain't much sexier to a programming tech-fetishist than a systems bible that's actually as big as a bible. Now that I think about it -- maybe CMP should pitch to design a leather-bound hardcover $200 edition?