[FM Discuss] final TOC

[Joshua Facemyer]

Andy Oram wrote:

> My impression is that FLOSS manuals uses a fairly conventional authorship model. Can you fill me in? I see books being written with one author per chapter, or even in larger chunks. Of course, people can edit and make changes, but there is a sense of one person being in charge of each chunk.

This is definitely not the case with the Inkscape manual.  While some 
chapters are authored mostly by one person, most of the chapters have 
been hacked at by various authors.

> O'Reilly, and several other publishers, are trying to figure out whether we can do print-on-demand and slip changes into each copy of a book we print. There are several difficulties with that. For instance, don't people who buy a print copy deserve updates? If so, how does the publisher deliver them?

I think the simplest way to approach this problem is to do official 
"releases" of the book (like a software design approach).  A version 
that is in development is available to the public (in the FM world), but 
it's not an "official" version until it is released as such.  At that 
time, it becomes a revision of the book and can be published as a revision.

I think it would be silly to assert that people who bought a print copy 
deserved updates.  I certainly don't expect any book I buy from the 
store to include content updates, much less any minor grammatical revisions.

JF