[FM Discuss] Beyond manuals

[Andy Oram]

Adam, I see good points in both your recent emails to this list: 1) we should consolidate what we've just done, 2) we should set the groundwork for the next books, even if we're a bit frazzled over the most recent efforts.

I think I'll have some time this coming Saturday to fiddle with the order and transitions in the command-line manual. I'm not going to put in such effort on every book, but I feel a responsibility toward this one.

O'Reilly just announced the release of our Twitter book, and Tim O'Reilly himself worked on it. Other publishers are pushing Twitter hard too. We should let the public know there's a free alternative.

Andy

----- Original Message -----
From: "adam hyde" <adam at flossmanuals.net>
To: discuss at lists.flossmanuals.net
Sent: Tuesday, March 24, 2009 5:57:44 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Re: [FM Discuss] Beyond manuals

Ewan from indenti.ca wanted to chat about a book for it. I didnt catch
up with him before the end of the fsf event...shall i write to him?

adam

On Mon, 2009-03-23 at 22:00 -0400, Andy Oram wrote:
> This is a valuable discussion; it is not blue-sky but goes to the heart of our purpose and challenges how we are to achieve it.
> 
> And thanks so much for your praise of my article, Anne.
> 
> I've always approached books as something to be done beautifully, as Mick has been talking about--as something several notches above the noise on the forums, but I'm being dragged back to that noise repeatedly. I got so excited about our conversation that I wrote up some of my ideas as a blog:
> 
>   http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/03/challenges-from-a-book-sprint.html
> 
> I want FLOSS Manuals to have an extra splash of quality, but I don't believe we'll get there just by reader reviews. My own career is based on the proposition that my skills are worth paying for and can't be replaced by a thousand eyeballs looking randomly over material. But I want to make the most of what volunteer reviewers do.
> 
> Meanwhile, I like Anne's ideas for keeping in touch through IM and Twitter and so forth. One of the phenomena of new tech is that people ooh and ah over something that makes it a bit easier for them to do things they had trouble with--not realizing that something even better is just around the corner. We must keep trying new stuff. And then we'll have lots of FM members who can document new stuff when it's worthy. Lots of books about how to build a business using Twitter are coming out around now. Suppose we did a book to promote identi.ca? And then followed up with one about Crabgrass?
> 
> Andy
> _______________________________________________
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-- 
Adam Hyde
Founder FLOSS Manuals
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Email : adam at flossmanuals.net
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"Free manuals for free software"
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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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