To help teachers get the most out of the Siyavula and the Free High School Science Texts projects (http://www.siyavula.org.za and http://www.fhsst.org), we want to see these resources printed as cost effectively as possible while still ensuring high print quality.We believe that by aggregating print orders we can do just that. Therefore we are setting up an online service called OpenPress to help educators pool their printing orders.
Before we roll out the online service with the full library of Siyavula, Connexions, FHSST and many other open textbooks we would like to manually do a pilot run. For this we have selected the FHSST Grade 10 Mathematics book. If you are interested in this book, the other FHSST books or this service please read on. The FHSST books and other open education resources have no authors’, editors’ or publishers’ royalties so we only need to worry about the cost of printing. Everybody knows the more of something you produce the cheaper it gets per unit and the same holds for printing.
If we all put our individual orders together, everybody benefits from a better price. Our goal is to help everybody get the cheapest possible price by finding as many orders as possible and aggregating them together. To make it even more attractive we’ll place an order for the first 1000 books (R50,000) which we’ll donate to severely disadvantaged schools. This will guarantee a maximum price of R50 per book and every additional order will makes the price cheaper for everyone. Details for the first pilot print run:
Book: Grade 10 FHSST Mathematics
Book Pages: 272 A4-pages
Additional: soft copy of the answer key available for educators
Cover: Printed 4 colours on one side only, Matt Laminated one side on Sinar board 230gsm
Contents: Printed 1 colour black throughout on Typek Bond 70gsm
Finishing: Perfect bound, sewn trimmed to size
Price:
R 50.00 per book (incl VAT) if the total print run exceeds 1000 books
R 40.00 per book (incl VAT) if the total print run exceeds 2000 books
R 35.00 per book (incl VAT) if the total print run exceeds 3000 books
The process:
- All interested schools, organisations and individuals submit the number of books they are interested in to orders@openpress.co.za
- We place the first order for 1000 Grade 10 FHSST Mathematics books with OpenPress
- Submissions must reach us before the 15th of November 2009
(Please note that this is merely an expression of interest and not binding. We will not hold you to it in any way) - OpenPress finds the best possible price for the total order
- OpenPress contacts everyone who expressed an interest with an offer at their best price
- Parties wanting to commit to this print run completes a contract for the number of books they require
- OpenPress prints the books, followed by payment and collection.
Other titles:
We are accepting expressions of interest for any of the 6 FHSST Books, Mathematics Grade 10,11 and 12 as well asPhysical Science Grade 10,11 and 12. We can however only guarantee a maximum price of R50 on the Mathematics Grade 10 book to start. As soon as the OpenPress site goes live we will make available the full list of open titles available for order. We have already identified 100s of titles that we will make available.
Regards
The Siyavula, FHSST and OpenPress teams