Hey there! I made this. I bothered to register an account here because this is the most negative, insulting thread about my book on the entire internet. I mean that 100% sincerely, both threads that appeared on 4chan were nicer than this one. Great going.
It's not immediately obvious in that video but the hollow inside the book is just 12cm/4.7". Compare this to even the expert-of-miniaturisation Apple, whose Mac Mini is 17cm/6.7" - and that doesn't have its own internal screen or power source. Hobbyist ARM-based computers can be shrunk down like a breeze (as evidenced by the many ARM dev boards), but hobbyist X86 miniaturisation isn't so easy. The parts in this book are a mix of custom PCBs, hand-soldered boards, custom-ordered parts and aeronautical-grade components. In this power & size category, the motherboard isn't a slow, obsolete thing - 6 months after I purchased it, it's still almost the top of the line system available for *any* amount of money. The CPU & GPU are from different ultra-low-power bins that Intel doesn't sell to the general public, so the system can be entirely passively cooled.
Using a phone or a tablet wasn't an option - I was trying to replicate the look of the linking book from the games *exactly*. Finding a screen with the dimensions, resolution & power consumption that ticked all the right boxes took me two years (and if you think it's too small, it's still larger & higher-resolution than the iPhone 3GS & people don't have trouble gaming on that). You can play Myst & Riven on an iPhone these days, sure. But those versions have had their resolutions reduced from the original PC versions, the iPhone screen is the wrong size and it's also the completely wrong aspect ratio. It doesn't look right as a linking panel image. Additionally, this book plays
all the Myst games - even the latest 3D ones. Which is why I had to stay with an X86 design.
For what it's worth, not all old books are inherently valuable just because they're old. Old tax books are a good example. The book Cyan used is basically a 135-year-old cross between a Reader's Digest & a gossip magazine, and most of the time it only carries snippets of the articles which makes it even less useful. Local distributors collected unsold copies of the weekly publication & bound them together to sell as an almanac. It's printed on one of the cheapest newspaper-type paper stocks available at the time & bound in a cover material that is essentially off-cuts from other books (this is why there's at least 14 different bindings of the same book). Even when it was made, the book had very little value. These days, books like this are sold to interior designers not individually but quite literally by the metre - their contents or even their title aren't important & their entire value is determined by the aesthetics of their combined spines. Even still, I have more than one copy of the book & I plan on adding it to Project Gutenberg when I have the time.
The main reason for the price in this book is because of the time involved sourcing all the parts. If it takes me 40 hours to research & source a part that ends up costing only $29.95, even at minimum wage the time involved greatly eclipses the material cost. The time involved in this book was in the high hundreds of hours, on-and-off over 6 years.
I'm not seriously trying to sell the book, that price is just there to stop people offering to buy it off me for $200 (which has seriously happened, more than once). It's also there to give people an idea of how much work was involved, because it's nowhere near immediately obvious just how much effort I've invested in this book over the last half-decade. And you guys make fun of me and call me a stupid ass. Thanks.
