🚀 go-pugleaf

|> lmitchel@nyx.cs.du.edu (lloyd mitchell) writes:
|> 
|>>I was playing with Fractint last night, and came up with (what I thought)
|>>was a good idea.  How about a "Best of Fractint" compilation/contest?
|>>What I had in mind was that a bunch of people would send in their best
|>>image, along with a small fee.  A jury would select the best images and
|>>award some prize money.  A compilation would also be published and sent
|>        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

On the list:  FRAC-L%GITVM1.BITNET@uga.cc.uga.edu
Re: "Best of Fractint"
"L. Kerry Mitchell" <mitchell@MITCH.LARC.NASA.GOV> writes

-> As it stands now, in consideration of issues raised so far, is 
-> that the "Best of Fractint" would be only a compilation, not a 
-> competition.  I'm favoring hardcopy or

My wife is a small time publisher, publishes 3 books in the health
area.  She saw one of my DEEPZOOM fractals over the weekend and 
remarked that she would like to do a book or calendar of these.

One of the big issues of publishing our favorite fractals in hardcopy
is selling into a distribution system.  It is one thing to make
a hundred prints for those among us who would like copies.  It is
another to get a production run of say 3000 sold.

One way to do this is commit to say one or two hundred at whatever it
costs, as a start.  Then get samples into the catalogs or distributors. 
If it goes, profits, when they come in, can feed back as royalties to 
the contributors.  

That is the usual publishing pattern, sort of.  The big problem with
this in any case is getting a start.

-> or disk-based distribution

I noticed Amgdala, the fine news letter with about 500 distribution by
Rollo Silver, uses slides as a distribution media.

-> rather than FTP, because I can't set up a site and I think it 
-> would be better to send out all the images at once,

Are there already FTP sites for images?  We could drop them in groups
into one of these in a special directory.

->I envision some nominal fee (~$10) to cover distribution costs 

Costs can run away, believe me.  But how do we get pictures distributed
on disk when the realy nice ones are about 250k to 700k.  The 
mandala5a.gif just posted to alt.binaries.pictures.fractals is 741751 
bytes.  Only two can fit on a disk!  The small format of 320x200x256 is 
not favored by Noel Giffin, and I agree.  

We need to discover how many folk would be interested in these pictures.
I presently buy the coffee table books that have about 20 pictures, 
tightly bound with 500 pages of math explainations of other topics at 
$50 a pop.  I'd much rather get a book with just fractals, or say 50% 
to allow some mention of contributor and formulas plus params.  The 
binding should allow for picture removal for display like a poster or 
for framing.  There are potentialy thousands who might like these pictures, 
but the readership of FRAC-L is a few hundred, Amgdala is a few hundred 
and sci.fractals may be a thousand.

Just a few thoughts...

Warmly,
Jay 'Not tonight honey, I'm editing another book' Hill
-- 
{ hilljr@jupiter.saic.com } begin writeln(3*ln(640320)/sqrt(163):17:15) end.
void main(){double sqrt(), y=1/sqrt(2.), a=.5, m=1,z; int n=0;
for(;m*=2,z=sqrt(1-y*y),y=(1-z)/(1+z),a=a*(1+y)*(1+y)-m*y,n<4;n++);
printf("%17.15lf\n",1/a);}