Inventory Fire Sale Soon, Print-on-Demand News

Hi text game fans-- a quick update mostly geared at those still without a physical copy of the book and looking for one, as I prepare to shut down my two fulfillment centers in the US and Europe.

All orders finished shipping earlier this summer and all should now have arrived. If you ordered a book and haven't received it, this is your last and final chance to contact me about it! (See the previous backer update for more details.) When I release the last of the held-back inventory for sale, I will no longer have any copies in reserve to send out to stragglers. 

The Fire Sale

When I closed pre-orders, I deliberately kept back a small reserve of books for emergencies (damaged shipments, straggler backers, etc). However, I need to pay my fulfillment centers to store this inventory and keep my accounts active, so as I'm now winding down their involvement, the time has come to liquidate this remaining stock. Here's how this will work.

This Friday at 8am PT (Pacific Time), I will re-open the the Shopify page with inventory for the remaining 50 Years books. This will be the final chance to get a high-quality physical edition from the offset print run. There is a lot of interest in these remaining copies, so I expect they will go fast.

Since remaining stock is tied to the specific fulfillment centers, there will be separate SKUs for US orders and EU/UK orders. If you live outside these regions, or want to order a book across region SKUs, there will be a very large shipping fee which represents my actual cost for shipping out of region-- apologies about this, but it is what it is. 

I also will have a small quantity of overstock items from the Ultimate Collector's Edition available, including extra floppy disks, hint books, posters, and game cassettes.

After the fire sale, I will really and truly be out of copies of all editions of the book, no matter how sad the sob story. However...

The Print On Demand Edition

I am prepping an edition of the book for print-on-demand, which will enable it to stay "in print" indefinitely going forward. These versions of the book will not be quite as fancy as the offset print run-- no faux-leather hardcovers or slipcases, and POD printing is not as crisp and sharp for deep blacks and images-- but they will be thoroughly readable and preserve all the content and history of the book. These editions will be largely unchanged in content from the original run, except for a few text corrections, and some fiddly layout tweaks to satisfy the different requirements of POD printers. (Amazon, for instance, does not allow you to have text running off into the margins even as a visual or design element, which I did, uh, quite a lot...)

Print-on-demand proofs from various companies testing print quality.

I plan to have two versions of the POD book: a softcover, and a casebound hardcover (think school textbook). These will be available on Amazon, and also through other retailers via IngramSpark: essentially it will be listed in a catalog that any bookseller is free to pull from and list for sale. This means you could request it from your local bookstore, campus library, etc. 

I am hoping to get these editions up sooner rather than later, hopefully sometime in August. I'll announce here when they are available.

In the meantime, the digital version is currently available in PDF, EPUB, and plain text formats. 

Finally: some folks have asked what is the future for Further Explorations, the companion book from the Collector's Edition? I am not currently planning to release this as a standalone volume, so trying to snag a Collector's Edition in the fire sale is your best bet to get a copy. I may eventually create a print-on-demand edition, but this would not be until sometime in 2024 at the earliest.

That's all for now! Take care and keep cool,

--Aaron