One of the more interesting bits (as one of the backers, staring at my copy on the shelf now), is that the author asked for pictures of the book once you got it, and just the ones he's been comfortable posting in the updates are amazing. People's whole collection of antique computer history with the book open to the page about it, or propped up on a typewriter, etc. I sent one of my Model M, Unicomp, Thinkpad portable keyboard, Ergodox and recent dactyl manuform with the book.
How is the quality of the actual writing inside the book? I suspect high - looking at the supplementary text, but everyone seems to judge this book by its cover
Pretty high, though I have only been skimming. It's kind of a coffee table book for me, since the part I really care about (modern keyboard cambrian explosion) is very short and way at the very end. I did read the entire small booklet "The Day Return Became Enter" and that was wonderful.
One item that interested me was the tax issue he raised - getting income in one year, and having to pay tax on that, but then expenses in the following year.
In my jurisdiction this is known as future-income, and essentially in year 1 a simple accounting provision is made (hence reducing profit in year 1) which has the effect of moving the revenue into the year where the order is fulfilled.
This is especially true for subscription revenue where "annual amounts" are almost always falling into 2 financial years.
This is enormously important from a refunds point of view - it's hard to give out refunds if the tax has gobbled 30% of the amount collected.
From the article he's suggesting this practice is not universal? Which somewhat surprises me...
It's possible to do this on an accrual basis, but when I have spoken at times to accountants about it, they have discouraged it: the IRS can be dubious, and it makes the most sense to run your business that way if you're entirely organized around it (i.e., you have a profound mismatch in your basic function between income and expense within calendar or fiscal years).
On the contrary, most places enforce this kind of 'deferral' (the accruals concept) to stop cheating. Imagine i took all of the cost first and the revenue later. I could offset the loss from this against my other income (which is taxed at source) and get a refund out of the tax authorities! It would be like an interest free loan!
In the US, for an individual/LLC, my understanding is that the default is that Kickstarter funds received would be income pure and simple reported on a 1099-K past some threshold. https://www.kickstarter.com/help/taxes
There may be ways to defer some of that but you'd probably need to work with an accountant.
It is called the 'Accruals concept', expediture must be matched to it's revenues. This is a fundamental principal of accounting.
It would be extremely novel for tax to be on a 'cash basis', but I'm sure there are places it is true. I think it might be an option on micro entity accounts for instance.
A classic example of this in action is with stock/inventory. Things still in stock at the end of a period don't hit the profit in that period, only things that are sold.
It's not at all novel. Small businesses in the US typically have a choice (C corps do not AFAIK) to use cash-basis accounting rather than accrual.
Which makes sense. If they're not making large capital investments that they hope will result in revenue over time, they're largely cash flow businesses.
Tax result <> Bookkeeping result. In fact bookkeeping result as per US GAAP van be different than the result under IFRS or regulations of other countries (for example due to different approach to depreciation).
Many countries calculate tax excluding accruals to stop fraud. When you have the cash now and need to pay tax next year, you could as well "run away with the money". Or even not run with the money, just spend it - and then end up unable to pay tax for two years.
Technically this fraud could be committed at any moment, but when the cash would lie on your account for a year, you could think abiut it more often.
Also conceptually: if accruals are allowed, you can basically shape your tax result to never pay any tax? Make bigger accruals every year.
It might be a naive question, but why don't they just keep printing the book, if it was a hit?
There is a section on the website that says: "The book is almost sold out. A small remainder of books will be available to order in late 2023 or early 2024"
I was looking for some beautiful books about technology, so I'd love to buy the book, but I can't, and now I have to hope that I won't miss that email.
Or is it just a sales tactic like booking.com's "there is only one room left" banners?
A book like this is likely not print on demand, and the cost to do another run is high enough compared to rate of sales that it’s not directly worth the risk.
You have to make 10k books at a time and warehouse them, for example. Selling 100 a year wouldn’t cut it.
This feels like a perfect use case for a RFP marketplace that I think the world desperately needs - and then perhaps there can be a few individuals or organizations who would do such small orders, and maybe that's all they do - and they get enough work where it's probably not as cheap as mass printing 10,000 but at least it could get done and at a reasonable price; maybe with a "by donation" option for individuals who feel compelled or able to support the manufacturer even further.
No need to actually do KS, just organize it as a group buy: If enough people commit and put down a deposit, the run is funded and it happens. If not just unwind it.
As others have said, these things take a lot of upfront cost, so they have to be done in batches. Actually there's quite a lot of products that are done this way, I would argue pretty much anything that takes "pre-orders" for a long time instead of "order now and get yours in a day or two", for example the Playdate console.
Thank you for these amazing comments and insight! One element I might not have emphasized as much in the linked piece is just how much of "team" you accidentally assemble. I project managed this for Marcin, but he hired other folks (proofreader and indexer) and commissioned some photography and 3D illustration. But beyond that, likely 100 people across our printer, the outside bindery (which did the hardcover binding), and the slipcase maker (an intensely handmade product as much as flawless as it might seem) were involved in bringing it to life. Then the many 1,000s or 10,000s of people who handled the books across the shipping process in the USPS and worldwide. Lots of people involved whenever you start working with pesky atoms.
In regard to determining pledges/pricing tiers. Rather than go by a few universal rules of thumb, it might be better to look into what people had been prepared to pay in the past for crowd-funding projects similar to yours.
A few years ago I helped a friend raise 300k on Kickstarter for a board game project. One thing I did was scrape (gently) pledge and backer data from ~100 or so projects that seemed to cater to the same kind of gamer he wanted to attract. Then I plotted to see which pricing range tended to bring in the most revenue.
It's still a judgement call in the end, because each project is unique, but at least you're not shooting in the dark.
This is an extremely good example of why any market research is infinitely better than no market research. It can inform product, technology, budget, and business.
Speaking of research, I'd love to know if anyone's ever done any research into why tabs nowadays almost universally expand to 4 or 8 spaces. Why haven't 5/10 spaces won out? Why not 3/6/9? Why is it powers of 2? It would seem like counting to 8 isn't much more difficult than counting to 10 or to 6. Each of them use less than 4 bits, which is a typical minimal cell of information even in the most primitive computers, if you look at right after the primordial stone age of holding one bit per tube or per magnet.
Early terminals - and the typewriters they were converted out of - did not have tabulation fixed to these amounts. Early code editors did not seem to have such tabstops either. So what gives? Did at some point everyone sit down and decide that tabs were 4 spaces, like in some sort of UN meeting?
I've been trying to get an answer for this for years. Maybe decades. A good answer still eludes me.
Maybe look into the number of characters that can be shown in a line. With 5/10 tabs and 80 chars per line you need to break code into two lines more often than with 4/8.
Although modern mobitors and resolutions are huge, so you could have 200 character lines. But arent they harder to read than shorter lines?
100% agree. We looked at comparable books in terms of how they were pitched to an audience, size, quality, features (slipcase, color, binding, etc.), and went rather low on the retail price in the end, hoping to make it up with quantity, which happened!
Definitely looking at comparable projects helps you figure out potential final dollars you might raise, average rewards, and distribution of rewards.
I would like a giant book about virtual worlds in games. Games that have a free-roaming element. So things like Zelda: OOT as well as full blown open world games like GTA V. There's so much work that went into them, and also so much collective human memory of time spent immersed in those worlds. Wish someone would crowdfund that.
If you're familiar with the sandbox mmo EVE Online you might like Empires of EVE. They're very well put together and very thorough historical accounts of some massive and long term player driven content/conflicts throughout the history of the game. It was so much fun to read about why my side's leadership made certain decisions and about the other sides' perspectives of some of the space wars I was part of when I still played.
Oh man, I'd really like a copy of that and I see they have a sale on ($40 for both hardcover volumes), but then... $50 for international shipping is a bit steep.
There's a book called Designing Virtual Worlds from 2003 that might be interesting to you; since it's 2003 it predates World of Warcraft and some of the information is dated, but other elements are timeless. It was re-released under a Creative Commons license in 2021: https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2021/08/richard-bartle-designing-v...
And another recommendation if you're interested in worldbuilding is the Encyclopedia Eorzea books from the Final Fantasy XIV game, three of them; they contain the full backstories, timelines, summarised in-game stories, locations, characters, races, etc etc etc. However, it's written "in-universe", not so much from a developer's point of view.
That said, you didn't specify which part of said games you would like to read about, I can imagine more information about the design and build would be interesting too, a look behind the scenes. The video game resources I mentioned get you there partway though.
I know this is definitely not what you’re talking about because it’s a website and not a book but it’s a link always worth sharing https://noclip.website/
Readit News
In my jurisdiction this is known as future-income, and essentially in year 1 a simple accounting provision is made (hence reducing profit in year 1) which has the effect of moving the revenue into the year where the order is fulfilled.
This is especially true for subscription revenue where "annual amounts" are almost always falling into 2 financial years.
This is enormously important from a refunds point of view - it's hard to give out refunds if the tax has gobbled 30% of the amount collected.
From the article he's suggesting this practice is not universal? Which somewhat surprises me...
Problem is with kickstarter, they should structure this thing as a loan, that gets written off by delivering or failing.
There may be ways to defer some of that but you'd probably need to work with an accountant.
It would be extremely novel for tax to be on a 'cash basis', but I'm sure there are places it is true. I think it might be an option on micro entity accounts for instance.
A classic example of this in action is with stock/inventory. Things still in stock at the end of a period don't hit the profit in that period, only things that are sold.
Which makes sense. If they're not making large capital investments that they hope will result in revenue over time, they're largely cash flow businesses.
Many countries calculate tax excluding accruals to stop fraud. When you have the cash now and need to pay tax next year, you could as well "run away with the money". Or even not run with the money, just spend it - and then end up unable to pay tax for two years.
Technically this fraud could be committed at any moment, but when the cash would lie on your account for a year, you could think abiut it more often.
Also conceptually: if accruals are allowed, you can basically shape your tax result to never pay any tax? Make bigger accruals every year.
There is a section on the website that says: "The book is almost sold out. A small remainder of books will be available to order in late 2023 or early 2024"
I was looking for some beautiful books about technology, so I'd love to buy the book, but I can't, and now I have to hope that I won't miss that email.
Or is it just a sales tactic like booking.com's "there is only one room left" banners?
You have to make 10k books at a time and warehouse them, for example. Selling 100 a year wouldn’t cut it.
It might actually be easiest to run such a second printing as a second kickstarter campaign.
A few years ago I helped a friend raise 300k on Kickstarter for a board game project. One thing I did was scrape (gently) pledge and backer data from ~100 or so projects that seemed to cater to the same kind of gamer he wanted to attract. Then I plotted to see which pricing range tended to bring in the most revenue.
It's still a judgement call in the end, because each project is unique, but at least you're not shooting in the dark.
Speaking of research, I'd love to know if anyone's ever done any research into why tabs nowadays almost universally expand to 4 or 8 spaces. Why haven't 5/10 spaces won out? Why not 3/6/9? Why is it powers of 2? It would seem like counting to 8 isn't much more difficult than counting to 10 or to 6. Each of them use less than 4 bits, which is a typical minimal cell of information even in the most primitive computers, if you look at right after the primordial stone age of holding one bit per tube or per magnet.
Early terminals - and the typewriters they were converted out of - did not have tabulation fixed to these amounts. Early code editors did not seem to have such tabstops either. So what gives? Did at some point everyone sit down and decide that tabs were 4 spaces, like in some sort of UN meeting?
I've been trying to get an answer for this for years. Maybe decades. A good answer still eludes me.
https://github.com/immerrr/lua-mode/blob/d074e4134b1beae9ed4...
Although modern mobitors and resolutions are huge, so you could have 200 character lines. But arent they harder to read than shorter lines?
Definitely looking at comparable projects helps you figure out potential final dollars you might raise, average rewards, and distribution of rewards.
https://www.empiresofeve.com/
https://heterotopias.itch.io/
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And another recommendation if you're interested in worldbuilding is the Encyclopedia Eorzea books from the Final Fantasy XIV game, three of them; they contain the full backstories, timelines, summarised in-game stories, locations, characters, races, etc etc etc. However, it's written "in-universe", not so much from a developer's point of view.
That said, you didn't specify which part of said games you would like to read about, I can imagine more information about the design and build would be interesting too, a look behind the scenes. The video game resources I mentioned get you there partway though.