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

[adam]

well as i said if anything the fm readership over the years, especially 
last year which was by all accounts "the year of the ebook", has gone up 
tremendously (and 2004 was by all accounts "the year of the video" - 3 
years before we existed)

so if there is a parallel demand for other formats that is normal and 
great. if you want to start a series of short manuals by all means go 
ahead :)




adam



On 04/23/2012 01:59 PM, Daniel James wrote:
> 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

-- 

--
Adam Hyde
Founder, FLOSS Manuals
Project Manager, Booki
Book Sprint Facilitator
mobile :+ 49 177 4935122
identi.ca : @eset
booki.flossmanuals.net : @adam

http://www.flossmanuals.net
http://www.booki.cc
http://www.booksprints.net