Hello!
Here is a Finnish fellow who sent us feedback, and I am forwarding it with his permission. What do you think?
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: vitaly.repin@gmail.com vitaly.repin@gmail.com Date: 2014-01-28 Subject: Selling of printed materials (e.g., calendars) [Fwd: FSFE still 160.000 Euro short for 2014] To: Otto Kekäläinen otto@fsfe.org
Hello,
Long time, no see.
How are you doing? I am doing well and joined FSFE at the end of the last year.
I have one idea on the ways to collect more donations.
Why not sell printed materials through Print-On-Demand services? E.g., calendars with FSFE dates and symbolic.
This technology allows not to have the physical items in stock.
I tested it for my personal project last year. i have created WallCalendar pdf for lulu.com and managed to sell it (mostly to myself, but this was the primary goal :-) ) through lulu. The quality was impressive. Only free software (LaTeX plus perl) was used.
Giving my projects as an example (which could be used as a starting point to create wall calendars):
http://vitalyrepin.github.io/WallCalendar/ LaTeX + perl + docs Associated Web-part (integrated with the printed version through QR codes): http://vrepin.org/cal2014/index.html Calendar on sale at lulu: http://www.lulu.com/shop/vitaly-repin/calendar-2014-the-four-seasons/paperba...
As I told, printing quality was impressive. The only problem I had was a relatively small (but still acceptable) size and absence of the hole (needed to do it myself). Delivery to Finland was done from Belgium. They have several typographies around the globe.
[Lulu has their own calendar templates available for editing online but in that case you can't change much in he calendar layout. And you are addicted to the service as well.]
I think that in order to collect more donations FSFE can publish their materials in POD form and sell them with different prices. E.g., the same calendar can cost different amount depending on the willingness of the person to pay more or less. And the person will always get something in return.
What do you think about this idea?