Living in Central Florida (since 2004) and visiting WDW every weekend as I do, it becomes easy after a while to see just how much the place changes.
So I started chronicling those changes with an eye toward history into a book series. Since these are like yearbooks you knew from high school, I called them 'Earbooks and stuffed them full of my own photographs snapped that year. I made a
first book in 2010, which was probably priced a little bit too high.
The second year, 2011, was even longer and so it had to be priced even higher. It's clear now that this was not the best strategy.
I've changed a few things for 2012. The format changed from 8.5 inches x 5.5 inches to a larger format, now 10 inches by 8 inches. That enabled me to keep the page count down, so the book could be cheaper. I also removed a few sections and stopped trying to include EVERY last change of decorations, walkways, and planters, which also kept the book shorter. Instead, I've focused on the events, the new additions (rides, shows, shops, and restaurants), and any removals.
The result is that it's now 62 pages, and I'm able to
offer it for sale for $9.99 -- significantly cheaper than previous years. I really think this it the right formula: much more affordable, but still in color and still long enough that it's much more than a simple brochure.
As before, we chronicle in photos those things which are NEW during the year, and those things which were REMOVED at some point in those twelve months.
Like all other years, there is careful attention paid to dates and details, the idea being to give future historians something meaty and accurate to refer to. For similar reasons of posterity, the book includes a few prices of events, tickets, room reservations, and food items as recorded in 2012. There's a full accounting of the entertainment and shows of a single Saturday in the summer season, as well.
An index in the back of the book makes it simple to find what you're looking for. One thing that HAS changed is that the organizing structure of the book is no longer "additions" and "subtractions," followed by a chapter on timeline. Instead, the timeline *is* the organizing principle. Everything that happened in March, for instance, is grouped together in that chapter, and the timeline for the month is included here as well.
I dearly love writing Earbooks each cycle, partly because I exult in simply owning them. I look forward to having twenty years of these volumes on my bookshelf, ready for me to take a trip down memory lane whenever the whim strikes me. And now you can too!
In previous years, I also distributed Kindle versions of the Earbook, but the process is manual, lengthy, irritating... and seems to have not satisfied all readers at the end of the day. The "jumbled pictures" format of the print version doesn't port over to Kindle, and the workaround - a straight scroll of pictures - doesn't end up feeling much like a book. For now, therefore, this volume will be available only as a print book.
Check out the book at Amazon (or, if you would like to maximize the author's royalty, you can
buy it from CreateSpace, which is a subsidiary of Amazon).
For anyone in Europe, here are a few helpful links:
Amazon.co.uk color edition
Amazon.de color edition
Amazon.fr color edition
Check out the sample images below (click for larger version).
You may already be aware that I am the author of a number of Disney-related books, including several detailing Disney parks around the planet.
Click here to read more about my published books.
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Kevin Yee is the author of
numerous independent Disney books, including the popular
Walt Disney World Earbook series and
Walt Disney World Hidden History.
