Lately I’ve been weighting the pros-and-cons of getting into the map business, especially after looking at the beautiful aerial photograph / map that Save the Pine Bush has printed at AccuPrint in downtown Albany. I really think the map I made of the Albany Pine Bush with the 2019 NAIP Aerial Photography with points representing newly built buildings is absolutely beautiful.

Probably the biggest thing holding me back is the high cost of both producing, printing, and shipping maps not at scale. Running the numbers, it is difficult to envision printing at a print shop and shipping a large-scale color 36×24 map for less then $50 and that leaves zero pay for my time or travel in preparing the map. If I add I figure an hour of labor for design of the map, I should add at least $20 for that plus $5 for taxes. So that gets me up to at least $75. That’s kind of expensive.

Obviously, if I could mass produce maps and sell enough I could drive down costs. One option for inexpensive maps would be to own my own large-format printer. There are many older, obsolete models, for sale within 100 miles that can be picked up for under $500. Businesses want to get rid of them, as many of the older printers don’t have actively maintained Microsoft Windows drivers — like the HP Large Format 5000 printer but still have ink carriages, paper and parts still available. I don’t care about the Microsoft Windows drivers as long as CUPS has decent support under Linux. But I don’t really have the space right now to have a large format printer in my apartment. They’re kind of big.

But there are options out there. Still I struggle to figure out what makes good business sense. I don’t want to spend all of my free time making maps for very little money, then having to go through the whole printing process. Or have to deal with taxes or incorporating a business. But it’s also good to know that for some time in the future I have that as an option, especially if I could develop enough of a market to have repeat sales of the same map over and over again. If I could sell a dozen copies of a map — or even hundreds of them — it greatly reduces both my time and labor costs, along with being able to get lower print shop costs, and even potentially making sense to have a large format printer at home for the lowest cost printing option of large-format maps.