[FM Discuss] final TOC

[Andy Oram]

Thanks, those are good ideas. The reason people who buy a book should get updates is that the normal book-for-sale model is a closed one. The book is not freely downloadable. So a publisher can't ask someone to just go online for updates. To have the whole book online is a different model--and we do that with some books under a CC license.

Andy

----- Original Message -----
From: "Joshua Facemyer" <jfacemyer at gmail.com>
To: discuss at lists.flossmanuals.net
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 9:49:02 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Re: [FM Discuss] final TOC

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
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Andy Oram  O'Reilly Media                     email: andyo at oreilly.com
Editor     10 Fawcett Street, Fourth Floor         voice: 617-499-7479
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