Dear Hub members,

After Alex, Alan, Yves and Tim have worked like crazy on the book, I would like to tell you a bit of our journey of printing, distributing and sales of the book.

Printing
In the beginning of this year we asked your opinion about how you would use the book. Your feedback was a confirmation of our thoughts of a "workbook". A -larger format- book - color- - nicely designed - that you can use and leave open on your table while working on it. Alan made several samples of book sizes in order to test the usability. We finally found the right format and decided to have this printed as a test. What happened? On the 19th of June during our Business Model Knowledge Fair we found that the book was not printed in the proper way. The book was useless. The print quality of the book was not good either. And so, Alex' theory on prototyping is so true. We learned a lot from that.

In the meantime I started to look for new print houses. Yes, we have been exploring also options outside the Netherlands like in China, Poland and so on. But, as the book is different in size, shape and print we can not rely on large print houses as we have to monitor the quality closely. Besides that, if you order larger quantities, the price does not differ so much anymore.

We found a print house in Amsterdam who wanted to show us a different binding technique. You see Maarten in the picture here (it is not me ;-)). A book without a cover and without a back. The book will stay open on the table anytime you use it. We found that very cool. However, Alan and Alex created 280 pages. The test print indicated a weight of almost 1 kg.
Interesting. At the moment we work on reducing the weight of the book, e-fulfillment of the book through www.businessmodelgeneration.com, shipment all over the world, the bulk shipping on september 1st and sales through Amazon.

I keep you posted!