Amazon to sell world's largest book
written by Robert McMillan (abridged) (2004)
If you've got $10,000 to spare and know someone with an extremely large bookshelf, you may be in for some interesting holiday shopping this December on Amazon.com.
The online retailer plans to sell a massive 100 page book printed on seven foot by five foot pages, according to Michael Hawley, a director of special projects at MIT who is publishing the book as fund raising exercise for a non-profit company he founded called Friendly Planet.
Hawley said he had signed up Amazon to "promote the hell" out of the book by contacting Amazon's chief executive Jeff Bezos at Amazon and said, "Now you really can be the world's largest bookseller." Hawley said.
The book, titled "Growing up in Bhutan " will be published using a Hewlett-Packard DesignJet 5500, a large format printer sometimes used for fine art projects. The book will feature photographs of the country and people of Bhutan, a tiny Himalayan nation of 600,000 best known for waiting until 1999 to officially adopt television.
The book's photographs were taken by teams of MIT and Friendly Planet photographers who visited Bhutan in 2002 while experimenting with ways to combine digital imaging and global positioning system technology.
Each book will be made from four 100-foot long rolls of 5-foot wide paper which are then folded like an accordion. Tabs will be inserted into the rolls at seven foot intervals and those tabs will then be stitched into the book's binding. Just printing the images on the four rolls of paper will take about 25 hours, according to Hawley.
The book was partially inspired by Audubon's "The Birds of America," which at two and one half foot square is the largest book in the Library of Congress. Only 175 copies of Audubon's book were published between 1826 and 1838, but it sold for $1,000 -- a princely sum at the time.
"I thought, well, maybe we could sell copies of the world's largest book for $10,000 per copy," Hawley said. "If we were to sell 500 copies, that would raise more than $4 million."
Hawley has contacted the publishers of the Guinness Book of World Records, and confirmed that his book will, in fact, be the largest book in the world, a finding that pleased the book's binding company, Acme Bookbinding of Charleston.
"I walked in with this huge thing and they just about peed in their pants," Hawley said. "They'd never seen anything like it."
