Wednesday 15 May 2013

Prasad's book

The Treshnish printing press is born!

For the last 7 years Prasad has recorded his bird and wildlife sightings, at Treshnish and in the local North Mull area.  Lots of people follow his blog, and use it as a guide.  Yesterday I met some birdwatchers, walking back to their car, who said they had checked his blog before setting out that morning! They had seen the whimbrel again at Haunn, and a pair of song thrush.

In 2007 we printed the first year of Prasad's records for the cottages.  This was a great source of information for Farmer and myself our guests - a snapshot in time and a guide to what had been/could be seen on nearly every day of the year.


Over the winter Prasad has been working on updating his bird checklist, and I managed to persuade him that we should publish it as a book.  With a lot of work on Prasad's part and professional help from Jane in Tobermory, we now have a beautiful 'coffee table' book to print.  The first copy will go into the Reference/Phone Room for our guests.


Initially, we are going to sell the printed book via the Blurb website.  Obviously a one-off book is expensive to print, but for us to print a large enough number to bring the unit price down to £20 or so, would involve £0000's and we are not publishers!

So, for the time being, the printed book will cost £52.50.  The cost to print each one-off copy is £46.99 and we are adding £5.51 to cover the layout costs.  It has 72 pages, of which 15 are photographs.

We are also looking at doing a Magazine format, via Blurb.  More details to follow.

Jane is currently converting it into an ebook format, so that we can sell it as an ebook.  I will post a link to the selling website (not Blurb) once this has been done.

It is disappointing that the printed book has to cost so much, but thank goodness for the magazine format, and for the ebook phenomena which means the interesting and useful information he has painstakingly compiled over the last 7 years can still be shared for a lot less!  

The copies in the cottages of the original 'Treshnish Flora and Fauna' are so well thumbed now that they are falling to pieces.   So we have reprinted them in a hardback, one copy in each cottage and they will arrive very soon.


The first copy of 'Birds of Treshnish & North Mull' should arrive at the end of next week. I am really excited about seeing it in print.  It has been a great and positive project to be involved with.

Thank you so much Prasad.






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