Cory Doctorow on how he intends to try an experiment in publishing, making the book available both free (e-book and audio), in print (print-on-demand) for a modest price, and in a very few beautiful (though expensive) and lovingly printed hardcover that makes me drool. I'll just quote the description of that one, but there is much, much more in the link.

Premium hardcover edition: $250, limited run of 250 copies

My office is in Clerkenwell, in London, close to several artisanal binders and some damned fine printers. My favorite binder is the venerable, family-owned Wyvern Bindery, which has agreed to bind a fine limited edition of With a Little Help for £20 a copy, in quantities of 20. The interior pages will be printed by Oldacres of Hatton Gardens, which will do them on all-rag stock for £17 each. Of course, hand-bound hardcovers are pretty common stuff. So, in keeping with the “nothing exceeds like excess” ethos of the project, I've come up with three very nice bonuses for the books.

First, embossed on each cover will be an original illustration of me as a superhero in cape and goggles, drawn by Randall Munroe, creator of the immensely popular XKCD Web comic (Randall frequently features me as this character in his strips, and it's become such a running gag that I'm routinely greeted at speaking gigs by fans bearing goggles and capes for me to wear).

Second, also embossed into each cover will be a rectangular indentation, just the right size for an SD card containing the full text of the book and all the audio. I'm going to use the nifty SanDisk cards that fold in half and plug right into your USB slot, for PCs that don't have built-in SD readers. The cards are glued into the cover with a dot of rubber cement, and so you have to decide whether to leave the book in “mint” condition and download the electronic material, or to play with the new toy—the perfect collectible conundrum.

Finally, every book will have unique endpapers made from paper ephemera solicited from writer friends, ranging from William Gibson and Neil Gaiman to Kelly Link and Eileen Gunn. These have been coming in all summer and they run the gamut from the wrenching (Jay Lake's cancer diagnosis) to the uplifting (Joe Haldeman's watercolors) to the uproarious (Kathe Koja's second-grade report cards). These will also be scanned and made available as a free, Creative Commons–licensed Flickr set.

Oh my.