Vinyl Factory | UK | Book | 2012

Next week, there will be a new book on Kraftwerk published, and this one is highly skewed to appeal to a music obsessed, graphic designer like myself. Better still, it focuses like a laser on Kraftwerk, one of the truly seminal groups in my pantheon of favorites. Next week a book that catalogs 45 of Kraftwerk’s 7″ singles sleeves will be released and under normal circumstances, I would be pretty much dead center for the target audience of this slim, but intriguing tome. But these are dark times, and the circumstances of this book’s publishing are anything but normal. You see, this is a book being published by the dreaded Vinyl Factory.

That means that instead of a publisher printing up several thousand copies at minimum to be sold for a price between twenty and thirty dollars for mass consumption, this book is being created to sell to an elite upper echelon slice of well-heeled Kraftwerk fandom in a “limited edition” of just 300 copies and a price of £80 [$125 at today’s rate, more of less]. This is the traditional Vinyl Factory way. They are not interested in reaching the largest possible market with their goods. That’s for suckers. No, they have seen the future of Capitalism and it has nothing to do with providing the widest possible swath of their prospective audience with a quality product at an affordable price. What are you, a Commie?!

No, their business plan is to create products that appeal to a reasonably sized slice of the Rock culture and then to severely limit the numbers of production in an attempt to simultaneously [and artificially] stimulate desire for as well as the price of these elite fetish objects they traffic in. After all, if they printed enough copies to meet the popular demand that a group like Kraftwerk, with thousands of avid fans worldwide who respond to their status as electronic pop groundbreakers, there would be no way that they could sell this slim tome for a buck and a quarter!

And just what does your £80 net you? Here it is in the words of the producers:

Product Details:

• This edition is limited to 300 copies worldwide, each book hand signed and numbered by collector Toby Mott
• Risograph printed 2-4 colour stencil prints using special inks
• 100pp section sewn with soft cover, printed on 150gsm Munken Lynx paper
• Outer dust jacket printed on Chromolux red
• Cover stock Chromolux printed on metallic silver
• Contains 7″ vinyl pressing of Kraftwerk interview

And here are representative spreads of the kind that will fill these 100 150gsm Munken Lynx pages:

spread: “The Robots” | Spain | 7″

spread: “Pocket Calculator” | Hungary | 7″

spread: “Computer World” | UK | 7″

Wow. Those sleeves have seen better days, yes? You would think that for $125 that Vinyl Factory could have sourced sleeves that weren’t in the lower reaches of VG condition, eh? Pardon my cynicism, but it looks like Vinyl Factory think they know how to milk a cash cow! Any publisher that produces what I would consider to be a mass market product in an edition of 300 is not interested in reaching a readership. If that were the case, this would be in an edition of at least 5000 and produced at an affordable price of $35 or so in paperback with maybe a hardcover edition of 250 that was “signed and numbered” for £50 [$80] for the elite cognoscenti. That Vinyl Factory eschews the former while only pursuing the latter speaks volumes to my ears. It tells me that they are not interested in reaching an audience. It say that they are only interested in turning the biggest profit they think that they can get away with.

It also tells me that the brains behind Vinyl Factory are avaricious nincompoops. Producing records and popular culture books [at elite culture prices] is an idiotic pursuit.  Especially at a time when the market for such goods in physical form is deteriorating amid an economy that is putting the screws to virtually everyone; not just Kraftwerk fans. If the masterminds at Vinyl Factory had any brains at all they would be securities traders so that their pursuit of filthy lucre at any cost would reap more efficient numbers.

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