This has been a long time coming. Over the last couple or so years I've had scores if not hundreds of e-mail requests from UFies asking for a Big Book of UserFriendly. Ten years of dailies seemed to be a good chunk of content, and this time I wanted the early strips in too, despite their awful scratchiness.
Along comes Manning, a well-regarded tech publisher staffed with the sort of crazies that would be interested in publishing a Big Book of Geek Comics. And so here we are, on the cusp of typesetting and layout. This is what I can tell you about the book:
It's BIG, at over a thousand pages. It will include every single daily strip from November 17, 1997 to November 16, 2007. It will have a table of storylines, and many of the cartoons will be annotated with my comments. These comments will range from dry wit to abject embarrassment. It will be HARDCOVER and case-bound, so it'll look exceedingly sharp, feel very posh and will also serve as a Most Excellent Bludgeoning Instrument should you need to give someone a deserving wallop.
It also won't be readily available in stores. To keep costs down, the vast majority of orders will be taken online. The clincher: we need 2,500 pre-orders to close the deal. This is an expensive book, which means it's also expensive to print. It also means that it's doubtful that there'll be a second print run, so if you want ONE UF book, this is the one to get.
If you order through UF by buying a UF Membership (Evil Genius in Training level or higher) your copy will be autographed! You can buy any number of UNautographed copies soon too -- give us a day or three to organize that. Books direct from the publisher retail for seventy-five quatloos, and of course we all know the quatloo is pegged to the USD at 1:1. Every order for every book will be counted towards that 2,500 mark. If you order by November 20th 2008, we'll make sure you get it by Christmas! (NB: My apologies to our international customers -- due to production timelines and the vagaries of International shipping, we can't guarantee delivery by Christmas. You might get lucky, you might not.)
(If for some unforeseen reason we're unable to hit that pre-order goal and you've paid for a UF Membership that would include the book, we'll make it up to you -- you have my word and Smiling Man's word on it. Probably a pricey replacement spiff that's shiny and new.)
If you haven't ever bought a UF Membership, or if you have and were thinking of renewing, now is definitely the time to do it! A book like this will not only give you hours of memorable enjoyment, it'll also give you a trip down memory lane. Remember when we were using Netscape 1.1?
Get yer red-hot UF Membership here!
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