Anyone has seen Photographer's forum "Best of Photography" book?

<p>Hi,</p>

<p>I entered a few photos to an online contest and have been selected as a "finalist" and got a place in the "Best of Photography 2010" published by Photographer's forum magazine (www.pfmagazine.com). Then I have been politely asked to book my copy by sending a $55 check because its a "limited edition" book and will not be reprinted. I think the magazine is legit and the winning photos are definitely good, but the letter does not mention about the number of finalists or how many pages are in the book. Suffice to say, I can pay for a nice hardcover photography book, but not something with hundreds (or thousands) of thumbnail size pictures from all finalists. <br>

Anyone has seen these books and comment? Thanks.</p>

<p>DM</p>

<p>Dyuti, I hate to be cynical but there are a few sites that use similar tactics as their source of income - bogus contests, everyone is a winner; everyone buys a book containing their picture. The book is "Limited Edition" because there will be no outside interested except from those who participated by contributing content.</p>

<p>Not saying the site you pointed to is doing so but just be careful before sending money.</p>

<p>I receive variations of these offers every year or so. It's a variant of one of the oldest schemes around, akin to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanity_press">vanity publishing</a>. It's not necessarily a scam - there often is a genuine book, such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexi_Belle"><em>History's Most Influential People Named Lex</em></a>. But for the same money you could print up copies of your own work through Blurb or another on-demand publisher. Either way, promotion and distribution is entirely up to you. That's the only way anyone else will ever see the books. At least with your own self-publication you choose the content, layout, etc.</p>

<p>Was yours a college contest? I entered the college contests by the same company (Serbin Communications) when I went back to college to take some photo courses. I just looked up my resume and copied this from it. I won a 26th Annual College Photography Contest (Finalist) Award of Excellence, Photo published in the Best of College Photography Annual and a 27th Annual College Photography Contest (Finalist) Award of Excellence January 2007, Photo published in the Best of College Photography Annual. Sound familiar? I was thrilled with my little 3x5 piece of paper award and also got the offer to buy a book that they were using my photo in. HUH?<br>

I passed and waited until my college received a copy. I can't remember if it was soft or hard copy but most pix were thumbnail size. It was cool to be published and I felt that I was in there with some other nice work but I would not suggest sending them $55.00. Even though I no longer am taking classes they send me emails for contests every Spring and Fall and it cost a few bucks per entry if I remember correctly.</p>

<p>I'm sure it's a legitimate deal to bill you $55 for a book.</p>

<p>I guess this would be on top of other, previous fees?</p>

<p>The pics don't have to be thumbnail size. There's a plausible method to get your great award winning photo on the front cover, back cover, chapter pages, maybe even a double truck spread! It's called dynamic content, and it's on a lot of web pages. Most of the time there's nothing wrong with it. It's the human interaction part of this scheme that gets me suspicious about your contest question. The technology is just the technology. Here's how that can work:</p>

<p>Check out the pictures at the bottom of this page. See how Josh and the computer gurus at photo.net have decorated the fora with pics from people who have contributed to the thread? Those pics are pulled from a pool of pictures that we provided them.</p>

<p>When Josh and the photo.net guys did this, it wasn't a part of some deal to get us to buy their book or trick us into thinking we're someone extra-special. The photos are pulled from those we upload against a fairly applied criteria. Now, check it: these guys here aren't running that contest, there.</p>

<p>Now, I ask you:<strong> how much of a leap is it to go from dynamic web content to dynamic book publishing content? </strong></p>

<p>It's not too big of a leap: there are some web-service-book-printing applications built into a lot of computers these days. Those are a little bit bigger in scope, but similar in principle.</p>

<p>Let's say I was running the contest. I have 86 great photos over here. I need to do a 250 page book (just because). Okay, so where am I going to get the rest of what I need?</p>

<p>You will send it to me, of course! And, voila! You are the winner of a special subcategory of our little contest! We have a just-because-you-are-you category!</p>

<p>So, like the pictures at the bottom of this thread, for X many copies that I run, say ten (a reasonably sell-able number to the people in the subset), I have ten to fifteen photographers get their photos slipped in on a "floating" type page. That is, the content of those pages changes dynamically with as many book files that I print digitally.</p>

<p>In a way, it's a form of customizing, no different than any other. The little hitch with this bit is that it's a form of customizing that appeals to your vanity. No problem there, either. It's just <strong>omitted</strong>; we failed to mention that this contest is won by almost everyone. [it can't be won by everyone, so we'll leave out X% of applicants so that we can create a crop of people who will want to try again.]</p>

<p>Now that we've coupled some social manipulation to dynamic web page content to book printing services, we can tell you that your photo (from the pool which is in our database) is among the amazing winners. Of course it will be a limited edition! We can't afford to print books that won't be sold because they contain photos made by other people!</p>

<p>When was the last time you bought a book filled with photos made by other people? That's available for free online! You don't pay $30 for that, do you?</p>

<p>If you do buy books with photos from other people, do you spend $30 a week on those photos? Is selling you and your whole community of people such a sure thing that we can put "photo books" on the grocery list, just like food, rent and gasoline? Nope. Sorry. Not over here.</p>

<p>So, I don't know it for a fact about that particular photo contest, but I'll tell you this: my little Apple MacBook laptop has more than enough computing power for me to, by myself, concoct and operate such a scheme as described above. I would need some start-up capital to do the book printing. There is really not much wrong with the idea, overall; but, the thing is this:</p>

<p>When people tell you that you've won a contest, they're making you feel special. Congratulations. It is nice. I'm sure your photos are good. I remember when I won a local contest for kids at the local library: it was really nice to have someone recognize my photo publicly. Okay, but the thing is, now we're grown up and these cats want you to pay them $55.</p>

<p>More like $75. There will be tax and shipping and maybe a smallish service fee in there. You will probably get exactly what they are selling you. They are probably running a 100% legitimate business. Trouble is, part of that business is about making you feel better without providing a corresponding amount of strength and fortification as a result of your efforts. For example, for under $50, you could just do the one-off book yourself, and not have to fuss with those other people's photos. Or, you could maybe get together with your friends, share, and everybody can be in the book, under your collective control; there would be a way to do it right.</p>

<p>You see the photos at the bottom of the thread? Notice how they load dynamically and change by who's in the thread? They don't cost $55. Yet, they, too, are a limited edition printing; an electronic printing, but a printing; and they will probably get you more exposure than an unknown and small number of copies which may or may not feature your picture.</p>

<p>That's my take on it. Then again, for all I know, it could be all about the cover of National Geographic magazine. Who knows. Yet, I'll tell ya this: people don't get on the cover of the big magazine or in the big smart-guy book by paying the $55 fee to a contest. It just doesn't happen. Maybe at the local library, in the contest for kids, where the prize is that somebody puts your photo up on the wall at the library. That's it.</p>

<p>I'd skip this one, unless there's some kind of more substantive business deal. If you're working with these guys for hours on end every day to sweat that book out: that's a different story. That's not what's going on, is it?</p>

<p>Dynamic content: it's not just for updating a web page with selections of free pornos anymore. It works for adding a select crop of photos into a very short, one-off (maybe a dozen copies) set of book printings.</p>

<p>If the electronic page that's used to print the book can have a shape in it that draws from a database or file structure in order to fill that shape with a photo, then how hard is it to change up that photo and spit out another electronic PDF of that book?</p>

<p>I know it's not too hard because that's how I update and edit some of my copies. I have a friend at a local computer lab who teaches classes; this same method has been eagerly adopted by many college students who do graphic design. It's a basic method to getting the books done by getting the pictures in there in a way that's more manageable than some other methods.</p>

<p>Okay, now, to make this commercially viable on a small to medium sized business scale, you would need Computer Guy to write you a script or application that would interchange some of the photo selections from the database in response to some conditions. While I am not advanced enough to write such a script myself, I believe that it is plausible to set things up (file structure, pages in the book, choosing a supporting scriptable application, handling the people to submit the photos, organizing the photos by aspect ratio and so on) with little computer skills. Then, bring in Computer Guy to write the program, help you smooth things out, etc. In this way, it'd be a plausible business model for injecting "your" photos into the contest winner's book.</p>

<p>I don't know if that's what's what in that particular case; but, that type of thing that I wrote about above is what I was thinking about in response to your question.</p>

<p>Publishing: everything's digital these days, including the scams.</p>

<p>FWIW, in that scheme, why would I, the Devil's Advocate, run it? Even on a small scale? Well, one more little assertion:</p>

<p><strong>Remember my 86 pages of photos? They're "static" content. They go in every single version of the book</strong> that gets printed. <strong>This advertises me. It is my main motivation </strong>for printing this hypothetical book.</p>

<p>Maybe I'll add in two pics from that pretty honey across the hall; she's cute; and, now, in the book! Two more from someone else I know who could use me doing them a favor. Voila! Most of the pages of the book are filled up.</p>

<p>Or, maybe it's my static content, and my colleagues' static content. Everyone who sees the book will see our content. At least 10 people who do see the 10 copies of the book I printed with "your" dynamic content photos will also see yours.</p>

<p>So, you see, everybody gets what they want. And none the wiser. What's wrong with all that?</p>

<p>Nothing illegal, but nothing super-credible, either. So, keep in mind that in a "legitimate" deal you may get exactly what you asked for. It's what you assumed about everything else that gets you in trouble.</p>

<p>For example, are you in a position to examine, pay for, and be responsible for every single copy of that book?</p>

<p>Well, there are some ethical questions about making assumptions and demands on those other copies; there is a strong perspective on why the dynamic and static content ratio may not always be a bad idea. Socially, we accept it in lots of web pages, for example. And, it's been used in print advertising for decades. Decades! An easy 100 years, documented and provable!</p>

<p>Okay, but if it happens to you and your photo, and you don't know enough stuff about printing off these things, then maybe you might get too disappointed. But, by then, you've already spent your $55 and it will cost you $15 in shipping and hassle to get what's left of your money back.</p>

<p>So, I would not go with it.</p>

<p>Again, though, I caution you because it could very well be that other conditions exist than what I hypothesize here. Yet, have a look at this idea of dynamic and static content, see it on web pages, know that lots of layouts are digital, mull over some sales schemes, have a look at the pricing: well, I think what I hypothesize here is plausible sometimes.</p>

<p>It could be done without a big book of thumbnails, and most people wouldn't be the wiser.</p>

<p>By employing a contest with "winners," we could have people featured in dynamic content of printed pages. <strong>The main prize of the contest would be to pay a segment of overhead for that subset of the print run.</strong> Get enough people to pay that overhead, and they could not only cover the print run and the admin costs, but the overpaying they do might also be a small source of fractional profit. Meanwhile, the service offered is printing and binding their photos in a book, <strong>just like we said we would.</strong></p>

<p>This dynamic and static content in printing for profit is nothing new. It's been around and accepted a good bit.</p>

<p>If you live in a major metropolitan area with corporate grocery stores: drive around. Maybe there are six stores of the same chain in your town. Go see them. For every one of those, pick up the printed flier that shows what's on sale. It's likely that each of the stores will sell all approximately "the same stuff," yet have different prices, different items on sale, and by different amounts off (10% here, 20% there and $4.99 here and $3.12 there).</p>

<p>And all of that will be in those fliers: they'll have static and dynamic content, based on conditional arguments about that individual store's sales.</p>

<p>Two stores have almost the exact same flier in the racks. Yet in Store A's flier, in block 3, broccoli is on sale. In Store B's flier, in block 3, purple grape soft drink is on sale. Except for block 3, their ads look the same. The same parts are the static content of the printing. The "Block 3" changes are the dynamic content.</p>

<p>That's where your photo would be going in that book, if selected. If not selected, then, hell, our book can only hold so many pages of photos at a given time anyway. Reserving the right to reject somebody is to our advantage. Back to the grocery store:</p>

<p>Meanwhile, in the store itself, the idea is repeated in a different way: the "static" content, all the other non-sale items, is also advertised and shown to everybody. Since the stores are united by a corporate or big company image, they all look the same, all "the same", but different in some of the sales details.</p>

<p>Advertising and pricing at the grocery store is one of the most commonly encountered versions of mixing dynamic and static ad content under a united image front.</p>

<p>That principle, the mix of details under what looks "the same" is a big deal in advertising, and probably a big part of some contests and other shenanigans. Good luck. Just make more photos and skip most contests.</p>

<p>It's a mix and match scheme and the main prize is paying their overhead.</p>

<p>This same type of scheme is how advertising is sold to companies who want to show their ads in periodicals of all kinds. The difference with this "contest" one is that no one is bothering to tell you that you are taking out an ad for yourself. That's what I think.</p>

<p>BTW, if the contest guys are good at what they are doing, then they will make several versions grouped not only against who is in it, but against how many people are likely to buy that version in a given area. It could easily be under the number of photographers who are in that print run.</p>

<p>You would think everybody who's in it somehow would buy it, but that's not how things work out. When a business like Wal-Mart or some Big Place takes out an ad, and the ad runs in the paper, not everybody who works there runs out and buys ten copies of the publication just out of sheer pride. In some cases people will do this, but merely being featured in print does not guarantee a sale by desire.</p>

<p>Say one version suddenly sells out. Uncle Bob wants to buy 65 copies that feature his one photo in the book. We only printed 50. What to do? He knows that the book is still "for sale", but he wants more locally, and might, at any minute, run into a copy that does not feature him. What to do?</p>

<p>Okay, well, first off, we have a shipping delay and a couple of other ways that we can hide the second print run. Next, if Uncle Bob is a squeaky wheel, or there are no other takers to fill out a full print run, we can just do another one-off to pick up the few copies that we need. As long as we don't lose that particular file that made the book with his photo, or lose track of Uncle Bob (maybe by geography), then we can still make the copy of the book he needs to see.</p>

<p>Zip codes and geographic zones are common ways of grouping these ideas up. It could be virtually any other assigned form of grouping. The only really unattractive event that needs to be avoided is the idea that Uncle Bob might encounter another version of that same book: and in that one, he can't turn to page 32 and see his photo! Ooops! Yep, better keep Uncle Bob geographically segregated from those other naughty, non-Uncle-Bob-photo-contest-winning printings!</p>

<p>At least until sufficient changes can be made to the book to pass it off as a whole "other" book: next year's edition, the fall edition, etc.</p>

<p>This hellish race that emerges: that's what's fueled by the stress of advertising in periodicals. The idea of being able to only sell so much to any one anybody: that's what makes a periodical a legitimate business model.</p>

<p>Notice, when the ad (your dynamic content photo in the book) is being sold, it's going for $55. Way under the thousands that businesses would be able to pay for ads in print, the $55 and the $2500 price have something in common: they are what the payer can pay.</p>

<p>As an individual, it's not plausible to pitch you a printing deal for over $100 without providing some kind of explanation. Look how unattractive this explanation has been already. So, I think we can get you to pay out $55 to Devil's Advocate Periodical Publishing Doing Business As "I Heart Photos Summer Contest."</p>

<p>So now the $55 slice gets plugged back in to a portion of the print run to cover all those costs, as above. It's the same kind of strategy used to sell the Big Dogs ads, but it's geared for The Little Guy who got a nice Thank You Note from a publisher advising him that Little Guy just won a contest.</p>

<p>It's about profit. Just yesterday I received a postcard inviting me to "celebrate" the birthday of my Senator. To go to the party, I can pay, get this, $58 per person or <strong>$580 per couple!</strong> I'm not going to his party for other reasons.</p>

<p>Well, the book for the photo contest: it's a periodical.</p>

<p>Most of the time we see periodicals as being newspapers or magazines; they have no hard covers or bindings. Well, there's no rule for that. There's no structural requirement beyond "got it paid for" or not. So, a book can be a periodical.</p>

<p>I would suggest that the ad scheme that's supporting the book company's income looks like periodical advertising. That's what I think.</p>

<p>Sorry for over-writing; but, I see a bunch of these photo contest deals on these fora, and I suspect that some folks don't much get it. It's nice to make a good picture, though. You don't have to pay for that other guy's book. Yet, a book's no piece of cake, either; so, it could go either way, but it'd go better if they just told people straight up what is happening; but then, few would be enthusiastic about participating.</p>

<p>Good luck with your photos. Consider skipping the contest. Write back if it works out okay. J.</p>

<p>P.S. <br /> The segment about Uncle Bob, above, is why American corporations want to avoid net neutrality. It is profitable to keep people contained within a geographic area in which the ad distribution is coordinated and controlled. If the people are contained, then they are not likely to run into other, similar ads, and spoil the persuasion.</p>

<p>Also cuts down on overhead.</p>

<p>And, profits for charging for <strong>royalties of mechanical access</strong> and distribution are normally <strong>limited to near 3%.</strong> If it's a tiered ad service <strong>under current broadband laws, then there is no limit to how much they can charge.</strong></p>

<p>Their 3% royalties potential on next-to-nothing <strong>goes up</strong> to $29.95 a month, per subscriber! Add in $50 for "primo" service. <strong>The dollar limit on it would be whatever they dare to charge!</strong></p>

<p>This type of law is covered under Royalties as they are regulated by the Library of Congress in the United States. You don't have to take my word for it, copyright.gov. http://www.copyright.gov/carp/</p>

<p>It's only a matter of time for them to mechanically spring the trap and bill us all, because almost all the pieces are in alignment! Aaaigh!</p>

<p>I once worked on the road. From hotel to hotel as I traveled across the United States, sometimes I would see three different versions of the same pickup truck commercial. Each touted the greatness of the people in its assigned area. I never did buy one of those trucks. Ha!</p>

<p>They're getting you to take out an ad for yourself and pay them for printing their book for some reason. If they don't say why, other than you're a great guy, pass it over. Proceed with confidence. J.</p>

<p>If you take this same type of scheme used by the photo contest people, and then you balance that against the FCC's and Library of Congress' regulations of the flow of information being played up by lobbyists: then you get to the big, mega-corporation version of this photo book contest thing: today's arguments about net neutrality.</p>

<p>Right now, corporations like Microsoft (through Comcast), Verizon, Google, and some others are not only playing against one another. They are also, collectively, playing regulators from those two key agencies, the Library of Congress and the FCC against one another.</p>

<p>They have been for years. Slowly, piece by piece, some erosion has occurred to the governing regulations. With particular attention to the ones which define a kind of information and who gets paid for the mechanics of information transmission, this erosion has occurred. Each one of those changes wasn't meant for total selfish greed and harm, but rather, each had its own positive, desired supportive outcome. Yet, the standard was changed and eroded.</p>

<p>Now, a set of conditions exists so that, with the right definitions and alignment, those same regulations can be doing all of those little good things. It's just that they'd be doing all of those good things in a nice, neat line to the benefit of some very large players in the telecom/broadband business of providing the Internet.</p>

<p>So, like with the photo contest book, it'll boil down to definitions and assumptions. One of the most common and most insidious tricks lawyers pull on people when manipulating a group is to deny that a definition is applicable. [it even happens on photo.net!]</p>

<p>If this definition or description does not apply to that set of activities, then it means that their regulations and negative aspects don't apply, either. This way, by selectively allowing what's defined as what, existing ideas can be used to paint rainbows in the sky with our imaginations.</p>

<p>So it is with that arguments about net neutrality, mechanical royalties, and the definition of what kind of business is a telecom business. By choosing a definition that's of one kind (favorable, a la Bush administration's FCC run by Colin Powell's son), then the subsequent regulations (provided by another agency, like the Library of Congress' Copyright Office) may or may not apply.</p>

<p>I would suggest that big companies, like Microsoft, Google, Verizon and probably many others, are running this exact same type of scheme as the photo contest book guys in the OP. They're going to leave out telling you about one part of the definition. They're going to do exactly, but only exactly, what they promised they would deliver. They're going to bill you for that delivery, as much as they want. Then, they're going to keep on cycling through this to do it again so that you pay their costs without receiving much gain.</p>

<p>That last part is called buying low and selling high.</p>

<p>It'd be tacky at the photo book contest; but, it's big business over at Microsoft's Comcast. They've got their own space satellites, if that tells you anything.</p>

<p>Meanwhile, what's worse is: if we don't let them do this insidious and irresponsible, unethical stuff, what's our answer to them going to be? Like Wall Street fatkats, and some business students from Harvard School of Business who won't give a simple ethics pledge, some people think it's cool and right to be unethical in making profit. Then, they destroy their own business by making imaginary, fraudulent transactions since about 1964! And, we have to bail them out so that they can bill us again.</p>

<p>Well. That same scheme the photo contest book guys are using; probably with staged static and dynamic content unified by a company image: a lot of big companies do this.</p>

<p>You can't be a master of photography without recognizing some of these facts about how that's how money changes hands over information. If you didn't already know this stuff, read up. Get a small flunky job in the industry somewhere. That's what I did. A lot of people learn that way.</p>

<p>But, I'd nix the contest. Adios.</p>

<p>I can remember reading about the same scheme for poetry - send them a poem and you win! And it will be printed in a book! Which you can buy! Same ol, same ol.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Thanks everyone. I also forgot to mention that they were asking me to "reserve" my copy before the contest closes. I can only guess that they are just trying to sell more books this way (once someone is not a winner, I doubt if they were going to buy the book any more) and the contest is not open to ONLY those who reserved their copies. I have already paid my entry fees for the images. If they are only selecting winners from people who have reserved books, that is strong ground for a class action suit.<br>

This is published by Serbin Communications and they also hold the "Best of College Photography" contest.<br>

It would be great for someone with recent memories to give the detail of a book they have seen (how many pages, how many finalists and what sizes images for other than the winners).<br>

Thanks again.<br>

DM</p>

<p>All I can remember is there was an index of winners names and the page number it was on. Some images were larger then others. Mine photo was one of the smaller ones. I googled "Best of College Photography" contest book 2007 and other variations to see if I could find a sample of the book but no luck. I vaguely remember calling or emailing Serbin with some questions and they did answer them. I suggest you do the same and ask them your questions if you don't find answers here. I did not see where Serbin posted any photos or detailed descriptions of past books.<br>

Another one of my photos won in a similar contest (<strong>The Society for Photographic Education)</strong> and I did get a free book, but it took over a year of bugging them to get it. I wrote them and told them that I saw my photo online in their website. I identified by the caption they posted with the image: page 65 Pensacola Junior College. http://web.mac.com/kathleenrbbns/iWeb/Site%204/due%20south.html Not sure why it took so long to get the books out to winners. I just went and dug around and found the book from that contest. It was softcover and almost 8x10. They gave me a full page for my image in that contest. Nice book. If your still a student you might check to see if they are still doing contest. I do remember the art department telling us that it helps to be published.<br>

While looking for info about the "Best of College Photography" contest I noticed a few resumes and newspaper articles on people that were finalist. EX: http://gargoyle.flagler.edu/2007/02/senior%E2%80%99s-photo-qualifies-as-finalist-in-national-photography-competition/ and http://www.fotocommunity.com/pc/account/myprofile/1289903</p>

<p> </p>