OT: writing a book, creating a community, etc....

[Evan Leibovitch]

Maybe I can offer some perspectives based on some work I'm doing at York U.


2009/10/12 Rajinder Yadav <devguy.ca-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>:

> I just came across this blog and found out you really don't make much money
> writing a tech book? It seems some of the authors are really smart, some
> cover a vast amount of material, others may go into a subject a bit deeper.
> Yet you get pimped by the publisher at the end.

[...]

> I started to write my own cheat sheet while learning Ruby, it's now grown
> and become to be known as 'RubyQuickNotes'.

[...]

> I know I was headed down the wrong path to hell with Lyx so I bailed and
> transferred the tech notes to using OpenOffice. It's like night and day! I
> am a MS Word kind of guy and this does everything Lyx can do but easier and
> without the stupid view build error or learning Latex code that stop you
> cold at odd times. The version of Lyx I have (latest on Kubuntu)  could not
> export to text, my code sample was missing. I had to learn Latex to insert
> code section by hand, was a pain in the neck, and in the end the sample code
> output was lost.
>
> OpenOffice I added a test picture with ease, TOC, tables, can generate my
> PDF without errors. I am sure I can save it in MS format and open it in word
> on my Window box.

If you are looking to self-publish, my suggestion is to design and
develop and store your book using strict HTML.

That way you have a number of options:

- Produce as a web page;
- Export to PDF;
- Publish as an e-book using the ePub format

ePub documents are a combination of XML and HTML documents zipped
together. It is a format heavily supported by all e-book readers such
as the Sony, and can be converted for use with the Amazon Kindle.
Software for reading is available for most computer and smartphone OSs
(support for Linux, OSX and Android is quite good). And, unlike PDFs,
the ePub documents are designed to reformat themselves to be most
easily readable using the chosen device (text can be resized and the
document re-flows, just like a web page.)

There are some challenges (such as doing footnotes for documents that
don't have physical pages) but these are surmountable. If you are not
looking for revenue you can distribute your work through Google Books
or make it available for download on your own website. If you want to
sell it, you have the option if applying DRM to ePub if you want
through third-party tools.

Check out http://www.openebook.org/ for more info on the ePub document standard.

- Evan
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