[Computerbank] RE: Micropublishing

[Buddrige, David]

beut!  Welcome aboard. 8-)

What I'll probably start doing - and would encourage yourself and others
to do so - is trawling the net for whatever suitable text-book material
is available - keeping in mind the principles of the GNUniversity - that
all documents must be freely (as in beer at least) distributable in
electronic format (although speech-freedom is to be strived for - so as
to facilitate moving them into the most convenient format for printing
as actual dead-tree books when the GNUniversity is underway.  Most of
the LDP - in particular, the guides - are ready to go as is.  Plan to
write to each author individually to get permission - even with LDP - as
a courtesy.   Other resources that may not now be appropriately licensed
may none the less be granted such license to us by the author if we ask
nicely. 8-)

Books that I can see an immediate need for are introductory programming
books, books about computer architecture and general introductory
computer science, starting at a 1st year college level.  However having
said that, I think the first thing to do is to get trawl for whatever we
can find - at whatever level - highly advanced, intermediate, whatever -
as a starting point, and then work out ways to fill in the text-book
gaps from there.

Latex seems to me the most obvious choice for book development format
where-possible.  However with existing documents I think that a good
amoount of flexibility is appropriate; otoh, if they can be by some
means converted to as generic a format as possible, that would be for
the long-term best.

In parallel I think it would be a good idea to start thinking about the
units we want to put together, and the appropriate lesson plans, lecture
notes etc that would go along with that.  This may however be slightly
dependant on appropriately licensed text-books becoming available on
which a given course can be based.

anyway, looking forward to more comments/suggestions/thoughts etc.

David Buddrige.	


-----Original Message-----
From: Rick Holbert [mailto:holbert.13 at osu.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, 26 June 2001 22:09
To: Buddrige, David
Subject: Micropublishing


David,

You can count me in.

I wrote the first article on MicroPublishing for the Linux Gazette, and
am 
presenting a tutorial on the subject at the O'Reilly Open Source
Conference.

I've refined the process considerably since the first article, and would
be 
happy to give you any advise on the subject that I might have.

With practice you should be able to produce a 200 page, trade size,
perfect 
bound, paperback book with about 5 - 10 minutes of actual labor.

Sincerely,

Rick Holbert