[FM Discuss] Forking an official manual for translation in FM?

[Daniel James]

Hi Adam,

> we get tremendous traffic and people spending a long
> time reading one page

Glad to hear it! :-)

What I'm getting at is that the length and format of manuals may have
been dictated by commercial printing considerations in the past. In my
own experience of pitching computer manual projects, the publishers
wanted a minimum of 300 pages and ten chapters to justify the book store
price.

Print on demand does not scale in the same way as litho - every page you
print costs you more, but with litho you have to hit a certain volume to
bring prices down, after which printing becomes much, much cheaper per book.

If $1 extra per copy to print a long book meant they could charge double
at the book store, but the publisher only wanted to pay one small
advance, it was in the publisher's interest to demand long books from
single authors (which took a long time for one person to write).

Litho scale also meant warehousing large numbers of unsold books
(returns, or 'remainders'), the cost of which are deducted from the
author's earnings. That's why Amazon Marketplace sellers can sell
remaindered computer manuals at a couple of dollars or less, because the
author effectively paid for them already.

Those rules may no longer apply to print-on-demand and ebooks, so we may
see a change in formats, favouring shorter, multi-author titles.

> I agree with exploring the other strategies but not to stay relevant. we
> are relevant.

To people that read manuals, yes indeed. On the other hand, a lot of
people go to video sites for tutorials these days. Some of the money
that YouTube content providers earn from advertising would have gone to
book publishers in the past, but that income may fall short of making up
the difference.

I see a parallel with how iTunes has failed to replace musician's income
lost from the decline of physical music formats. In my view, this is why
book publishers are putting high ticket prices on ebooks, so they don't
repeat the mistake that the record labels made when they allowed Apple
to sell tracks at 99 cents. Apple didn't care about music production and
distribution being profitable, since their money was made on the iPod
hardware.

Cheers!

Daniel