[FM Discuss] final TOC

[John & Melonie Curwood]

I know it doesn't quite fit the model of a single published book, but 
when I was in high school my parents bought a copy of Encyclopaedia 
Britanica, as part of that purchase they recieved an anual update for 
the next five years.  These updates included for example articles that 
had new research completed or world events had caused the original 
article to become outdated, and there was even brand new content and 
articles that hadn't been in the original volumes purchased. 
Im' not sure how that would fit with a single book except maybe to print 
any chapters that had recieved major changes.and send those out to 
purchasers until the next major revision is released.  A book purchaser 
would end up with the original volume and a few thin volumes of any 
chapters that had recieved major updates.  It's messy I know but unless 
the book is sold in a ring binder version you can't really pull out old 
chapters and replace them with the updates.

Cheers,

John Curwood


Andy Oram wrote:
> 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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