Despite its original $300+ price tag Rudie Kuiter managed to sell quite a few copies of his fabulous compendium on wrasses, Labridae Fishes. The hardbound work of devotion to wrasses has over 400 A4 pages covering more than 500 species of wrasses, making it a very heavy and expensive print job for self publishing. In the two years since Labridae Fishes was first announced Rudie Kuiter has been working with various publishers to get the cost down and he’s finally found a way to offer the wrasse bible at half the price!
By going to a softcover and a smaller A5 format page with 5.8 x 8.2 inch (150 x 210mm) area, Kuiter will now be able to sell his wrasse book for $150. That doesn’t include shipping from Australia but at just one kilogram a piece, these will be cheaper to deliver as well. While he was at it Rudie changed and updated certain parts of the book, probably to include more recently photographed and described species such as Cirrhilabrus nahackyi, Cirrhilabrus squirei, Cirrhilabrus claire, Cirrhilabrus humanni, Halichoeres hilomeni and H. erdmanni, the komodo flasher wrasse, Pseudocoris petila and who knows what else.
Kuiter tells us that the first 50 copies of the new size Labridae Fishes are selling like hotcakes but with the new publisher he can have a turnaround time of one week. With the new semi-affordable price point we imagine some marine aquarium entrepreneurs will likely import a handful of these to the US for resale, but if you want to get a copy directly from the author, you can email ‘rudiekuiter at optusnet dot com dot au’.
