This year me and the gracious ladies I work with at school are thinking about doing some type of yearbook of our kindergarten classes documenting the classroom activities, field trips and plays we have. Then the question of the yearbook format came up and I’ve been assigned to do a little research about which might be the most cost-effective for 75 students: Print (magazine or book), Videotape, CD-ROM or DVD.
(My colleagues still don’t know about this think tank we’ve got here at SDMB, so here’s my “research”. Heh, heh.)
I think a CD-ROM might prove the least prohibitive of all to do, but one of the ladies pointed out quite a few of our parents don’t own computers, but they’ll probably have VCRs players or possibly DVD players. I was concerned with the cost of making copies of the videotapes and DVDs.
We all assumed print yearbooks might be too expensive… but maybe that’s not necessarily the case.
CD or DVD might be a nice add in to a printed yearbook, but without print, how will you collect everyone’s signatures? How can you write in someone’s crack? How can you be the clown who came to town to write in your yearbook upside down? How will you know if you actually are 2 cool 2 be 4 gotten?
I’m all for progress, but sometimes print is the only way to go, cost be damned.
Also remember that someone might want to look at their yearbook 50 years from now, at which time it might be pretty tough to find a device that can read a CD-ROM or DVD. Imagine if, 15 years ago, you had put a yearbook on 5 1/4" floppy disks! For some things, as Max Carnage has pointed out, print is the only way to go.
No. Sorry. Print is NOT the only way to. “Cost be damned” is not an option for our cash-strapped inner-city school. Funds are extremely tight. We are having seven fundraisers this school year to pay for, among other things, the food, materials and lodging of our classes when we take the students camping next March, and the transportation for that and our other educational field trips. We’re merely trying to find a cost-effective means of documenting the school year, since have not done so in the last six years of our school’s program.
I agree that print is probably OPTIMAL, but having worked on several college yearbooks I know how expensive it can get, and how you have to sacrifice things like color photos, paper quality, hard covers and pages to bring the costs down.
I’m assuming that we could do it cheaper than a print version in some sort of multimedia format without necessarily sacrificing color images, picture quality or length – and add things, like contemporary music and possibly voice features, too.
My overriding concern now is cost as opposed to format longevity.
Can you do something like a yearbook magazine, even in b&w, and include the cd-rom in the back? Would be cheaper to staple rather than bind hard covers, I’d think.
We had this discussion not too long ago - about file formats, that is.
For the CD, you should use HTML. HTML can be read by any computer, with out buying (or downloading) extra software.
My personal choice in the deal would look like this:
Create year book in Lyx.
Export to Postscript or PDF to be printed.
Have the printed copies made as inexpensively as possible.
Export from Lyx to Tex and convert that to HTML.
Burn the HTML to CD.
You might use Word, but I don’t knwo how well Word does with breaking things down according to the table of contents and linking the pages that way. My fuzzy memory (I don’t have Word at home) tells me that Word only exports a single (huge) page for each document with no structure - which would not be good.
You could burn the PDF onto the CDROM with the HTML if you wanted.
You can sell (give away, whatever) the CDs and printed copies. The folks with the CDs can print their own (from the PDF) if they want (and can.)
How many kids and how fancy are we talking? I’d consider doing the layout and file creation for you if its not too wild. You send pictures, names, and text, and I’ll send you the PDF, and ISO image for the CD, and my LYX and Tex files - and I’d delete all your stuff from my computer when I’m done.
Sounds like with cost concerns as heavy as yours, Video CDs (VCDs) might be the way to go. This is a way to burn video on a normal CD-R that will not only allow it to be viewable in virtually all computers (even a Windows 95 PC will play MPEG-1 video out of the box), but will also allow it to be watched on 80-90% of standalone DVD players! For maximum compatability and lowest price, I think this is really the way to go. This way, even those without DVD players, but with computers, will be able to watch. Not every computer has a DVD-ROM, so you can’t say the same about DVDs. Just about every computer made since the mid-90s has a CD-ROM or compatible device.
Plus, you can accomplish the entire VCD creation process with freeware. That’s always a big plus.
If you decide to go this route, I’ll happily provide you with as much help as I can. My email is in my profile. Also, you may want to check out DVDRhelp.com, which, despite the name, is an invaluable resource for VCD info. It actually used to be called VCDhelp.com, but technology is moving forward, I guess.
You could also toss a PDF on the root of the VCD to have something people could print, if you wanted.
Stay away from Word. I can’t tell you how many Word documents I’ve been unable to open correctly in Wordpad because I don’t have MS Office installed. It’s possible that there’s a viewer or something for the files, similar to the free Powerpoint viewer they provide, but it’s certainly not installed with Windows by default.
Sorry to have been unclear. I meant “use Word to create the HTML.” Which is still not a really good idea, given what I seem to remember about Word’s HTML export.
Any kind of non-print medium will be hard to read even ten years from now (5 1/4" floppies, anybody?), and it would be idiotic to get a hardcover book for a class with 75 kindergarteners.
Look at the handbooks they can print up for you at Kinko’s for about five bucks apiece, spiral-bound in plastic covers. It’s fancy enough to impress a little kid, cheap enough to placate the parents, easy to compose on your home computer, durable enough to be signed, looked at for a couple of weeks, and kept on a bookshelf until they’re old enough to accumulate real yearbooks in high school.
My yearbooks from junior high are magazine format, saddlestitch (five dollar word for "stapled). For kindergarteners, you can go a lot cheaper.
Krokodil has it right. Best and cheapest is print. I didn’t know about the thingies from Kinko’s (we don’t have them here, although I’ve been in them in the US,) but that sounds like a good way to go.
I wonder how much “signing” will be done in a kindergarden yearbook.
True, but I could still thumb through Grandpa’s old printed year book now - and in a hundred years if it is stored properly. All I need to read it are my eyes.
We’ve yet to reach the point where we can’t improve electronic media, and until we do the forms and formats will keep changing.
DVD players read CDs because of a conscious decision by the manufacturers to make them backwards compatible. How long will it be before some manufacturer comes out with a DVD only player for $0.50 less than a DVD/CD player?
Doubtful. It just wouldn’t make any sense. All known DVD players play CDs and virtually all new music is being issued on CD. I can’t see someone cutting a corner that huge to save a few cents.
There are currently five standards competing to be the successor to DVD, HD-DVD (standing for both high definition and high density). No matter which standard wins out, it will be backwards compatible with old DVDs, thus it will be compatible with CDs, as well.
Print is certainly the most durable option, but can you print a copy of a nice, color yearbook for 25 cents? You can burn a CD that cheap.
True. And read it on a PC that costs a great deal more.
Anyway, you’re probably right about CDs for now. They do a fair job for audio quality, and hold a reasonable amount of music - and an awful lot of people have players/readers and burners.
That, or read it on a DVD player that costs $49. Read what I wrote above about VCDs. Also note that as DVD players get cheaper and cheaper, they only seem to be adding features, rather than taking them away.
Kinko’s is a nationwide (US) chain of quick-print shops (mostly Xerox machines, but they also have computer printers and even bubble-dot for printing stuff on t-shirts). Presentation kits for businesses and booklets for school assignments are their bread and butter, and they (or any other quick-print shops, like Kwik Print or Sir Speedy, or any of the bazillion independants) could print and bind perfectly adequate “yearbooks” for a competitive price.
Let’s say these yearbooks are 40 pages @ 6 cents/page, with maybe a buck each for binding and another buck fifty for an attractive plastic cover (more if it has something printed on it). You’re looking at a unit cost of five bucks give or take. Tell them it’s kindergarteners and give them a full-page ad in the back, they may well knock off a buck per unit.
Here in the States, Kinko’s is to quick print what Starbucks is to coffeehouses: It’s not necessarily the best, but it is the most ubiquitous.
About 12 years ago, the music industry was agressively pitching mini-CDs, giving away free ones with Coca Cola coupons. Consumers weren’t interested. But with the popularity of MP3 players and the postage stamp-size disks they play (which appear to hold more data with every ad I see), we could see the end of CD and DVD manufacture within a decade.
Hey, who ever thought that LP’s would be this obsolete? Or 78s?
Why? If you can encode more information on a smaller disc, you can extrapolate those techniques to a normal-sized disc for even greater data storage. Bear in mind that greater data storage means better video quality and longer play time.
Also note what I said about the new generation of HD-DVD players. They’ll be quite capable of playing a CD released in 1984, yet they’re not even slated to begin producing movies in that format until 2005 at the earliest.
Plus, the longer we continue to use the 5" disc format, the greater the need for backwards compatability will be. Can you really see people abandoning all their DVD movies AND audio CDs because they’d really rather have discs that are a tiny bit smaller? Unlike, say, a laserdisc, the size of CDs and DVDs is not too big to make them readily portable.