Ames, Iowa To Be Included In New Book

Not just any book, either. It's a coffee-table edition of The Daily Dish feature, "The View From Your Window." Andrew Sullivan and company have been collecting reader submissions over the past few months, and put them together into a book. What's unique about the process is how they were able to cut down the cost:

How did we get the price down by half? We did it the way publishing houses do it - with a twist. We didn't guess the demand or market test it, we simply asked for pledges. We crowd-sourced the price. We got enough pledges to do a print run of 2,000 which brought the price down to $16.25. But unlike the publishing houses, we're not pocketing the difference. We're handing it over to you in a lower price. Blurb will make some money - they're a business, after all, and they're doing the heavy lifting - but apart from that, you are merely paying for the actual materials of the book. Since the pictures are yours, and this blog is yours, that seems fair.

Of course, once those are gone, the price goes back up to $30. I've already got my copies ordered.