[FM Discuss] books and fm - need your thoughts!

[Seth Woodworth]

This is a potentially very dangerous question.  There is a history of issues
being caused between profit-making and pure-volunteers in a massive
volunteering project.  I'm not saying that it's an insurmountable problem,
but just potentially issue-causing.

My suggestion is to do #3, and ultimately to provide tools, widgets and
other support for other retailers.  And *ideally* we would work to find a
single benevolent dictator of a retailer that would give money back on a
case-to-case basis.

Another interesting consideration is that I'm getting paid (hypothetically)
for organizing work on the OLPC manual, and I am technically the final
responsibility on the project but Anne is very much the one who has the most
edits so far.

It's a complicated question.

On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 6:16 PM, Joshua Facemyer <jfacemyer at gmail.com>wrote:

> adam hyde wrote:
>
>>
>>  The second question I have is whether we couldn't do something of a
>>> combination, such as 1&3.
>>>
>> We can mix it up anyway we want. What do you like about those options?
>>
>> adam
>>
>>
> Well, I think #3 is a given, seeing as it's GPL - unless of course you're
> referring to the ready-for-print data, in which case it might be a better
> idea to do something like sell larger quantities at wholesale prices, then
> they can be resold for profit.
>
> However, I think that, no matter what, the bottom line is that FM makes a
> profit from every book sold for profit.  Cuz Adam needs to feed himself too,
> otherwise we don't have FM.
>
> So, I think the best idea is an FM book shop which offers book sales for a
> profit, profits are apportioned to both FM and the maintainers/their
> projects (however that will be decided), and wholesale book prices are
> offered in quantity which still allow for some profit for FM and the book
> teams.  Seems fairly simple and easy enough to manage.
>
> Also, as regards ISBNs, etc, I think you should just ignore them.  It's
> really too much hassle.  However, it might be a good idea to code books with
> an FM code to maintain order.  This way, if a book shop wants to sell FM
> books, they can do so, but if they simply cannot live without an ISBN on
> each book they sell, oh well.  (Besides, don't shops all offer other items
> apart from books, which also don't have ISBNs?  They'll figure it out if
> they really want to.  And if they really want to, then it's likely that
> they're a smaller book shop which can actually handle that sort of thing :)
>
> Hope that's clear.
>
> JF
>
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