Twelve Virtues booklet printing?

How well do the "Twelve Virtues" really work as an introduction? After having devoured the entire Yudkowskian canon, I can reread the "Virtues," and it makes sense, and it's beautiful, and I love it, but I've experienced poor results on the two occasions that I can remember pointing others to the document. (One person, already a scientific-rationalist type, was turned off by the poetry; for example, he objected to "curiosity seeks to annihilate itself," saying that curiosity shouldn't be extinguished. I said he was misinterpreting the line, which clearly refers to the answering of a specific question rather than the end of curiosity-in-general; he said it was just poorly-written. The other person, a New-Age spiritual type, just horribly misinterpreted the entire document.)

Related: I.J. Good's (1971) "Twenty-Seven Principles of Rationality".

There are three options I can find:

http://www.psprint.com Cheapest offset printing for booklets. 16-page, 5.5"x8.5", black and white booklets have a unit-cost of $0.15 for orders of 10,000 and $0.19 for orders of 5,000. Update: with shipping and fees, this price almost triples.

http://www.printplace.com Cheapest offset printing for single page, 8.5"x11" trifold pamphlets. Unit cost of $0.05 for 10,000. Update: Now the cheapest online booklet option. 16 pages full color booklets (no b/w option) are $0.30 per unit total cost in orders of 5,000.

http://magcloud.com POD magazines. Currently only offer 8.5"x11" full-color mags for $0.20 per page + shipping, so not cost effective to hand out, but if you wanted just a handful of something, it's an option.

Updated: Take that back. Changed prices once I thought to include shipping prices. A local option would probably be better as David Rotor suggested.

Costs can vary considerably between different printers for the same job. Here are some of the variables that go into an estimate you'll get:

1. Design. Standard paper sizes with no cutting or trimming is less expensive.
2. Utilization. If the printer has excess capacity, you can expect a lower cost
3. Delivery time. Related to utilization, the longer you can wait for your job, the more opportunity the printer has to schedule it to maximize his utilization.
4. Materials. More colours are more expensive. Heavier paper is more expensive. More than one type of paper is more expensive (glossy cover, plain pages, for example).
5. Production equipment. Not really relevant for your job, but for more complex printing certain production processes are cheaper for certain jobs. As you would expect, each printer will gladly bid for work, even if they don't have the ideal equipment for a job.
6. Binding. From lower cost to more expensive: Stapled, stapled and taped, cerlox, wire coil, perfect (glued).
7. Competition. Getting more than one bid, and letting the printer know you are getting more than one bid. However, you also need to consider the printer's cost to bid against their internally perceived chance of winning the business. Two or three bidders is likely to be better than 10 or 12.

A very quick (two minute) google search turned up online bids around $1200/10,000 for an 8 page stapled and taped booklet. As this necessarily includes shipping, you should be able to find a local printer willing to do this job for under $1000 ... especially if you give them time.

Final suggestion ... university print shops often provide low cost printing for tenured professors.

And ... I agree with Roko's comments. I recommend a revision to take some of the more "proselytizing" tone out of the work. I like the light hearted tone of much of the material, but it often steps over the line and becomes condescending.

A minimum order of 10,000 for $1000 would be quite acceptable - I expect at that price I could ship some boxes to other LWers.

Did this problem ever get solved? I was considering handing out Twelve Virtues pamphlets in meatspace (as I am wont to do elsewhere), but am burdened by the trivial inconveniences of not having a stapler or a printer.

I love the tags on this article.

Downvoted for probable spam.

If you're not a spammer, reply to this and I'll reverse my downvote.

Roko may be right, but if they were that cheap it would totally be worth buying some to give away.

Does it all really have to be on paper?

Why not print a great one-page teaser that encourages those who are interested to visit the page, and site, online? Links are much easier to pass around to multiple people than paper.

The twelve virtues seems to me to be too religious in its tone. Yes, it contains a lot that is useful, but it is probably too mystical sounding to convince anyone.

I suspect that a very, very sober summary of the same ideas, with some citations to the literature would have more of the effect we are after. Something that sounded like it had been written as part of a competition between Nick Bostrom and Robin Hanson to see who could express facts in a more sober way.

What you want is Clickbooks, a $50 program that lets you impose documents into 8 page signatures which are 1/4th the size of standard letter-sized paper. It also converts to PDF which you can upload -- see here: http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=F.2a479b87-373c-4b80-ba3a-f3310d73b857&hl=en

As a bonus, you can use it to print out long PDF files, owner's manuals for example, which would otherwise not be feasible. A 200 page documents requires 25 sheets of paper.

Check out www.worthshorts.com, it might work for you.

Is this article really about booklet printing, or was it an excuse to call attention to the Twelve Virtues article? If the latter, I think it would be better to just repost them directly.