Book pricing and costs

Hi, everyone. Mr. Mitten here with some more info on the book's pricing. As Barbara said earlier today, Lulu recently had a price hike on all printed materials. Before, you were paying $12 in printing costs per book, but now it's up to $15, which is quite a significant difference. Unfortunately, that means that we couldn't continue charging $19.95 per book, especially considering that we also have to pay Lulu's commission on each item sold.

This is why the price for printed books went up by a bit. We tried to make it up to you guys by lowering the price on the download version to $17.50 -- hopefully this will help those of you who aren't interested in getting the printed version (though it's nice and shiny! I'm very pleased with it.)

Just a couple of words about our operating costs -- we barely have any. :) The book was written entirely in Free Software (pictures done in Gimp, covers and charts done in Inkscape, and the layout done in Scribus, all of it running on Fedora Linux). Apart from Lulu (or Etsy), there are no other middlemen, so anything you pay goes straight to the artist, making sure that she is always pregnant with new ideas (*badum-pum!* ;)).

Overall, this distribution model works out pretty well for everyone, and unless Lulu's printing costs go up again, we should be able to continue to offer patterns at comparatively low costs (at least compared to some other pattern designers.)