Github, the future of book publishing?
github.com
github.com
What I really hope to see catch on though, is the format that this book is written in. There is definitely a shortage of technical resources that is longer and more in-depth than an online tutorial, yet shorter and more to-the-point than the full fledged 500-pager. I feel like reading this book gave me just enough info to make an adequately informed decision on whether or not MongoDB is what I'm looking for and worth looking into, or that it isn't the fit for whatever application I'm writing. Great work!
Highly recommend you check this out. We're pretty interested in this idea and definitely want to see it take off.
The Modern Perl Book I linked to elsewhere here also comes with publishing tools for producing PDF, LaTex, ePub & HTML and (I believe) was used for the finished printed book (http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/).
Fixing errors and sending a pull request via an interface we all already know would be much easier than tracking down author contact info. Having said that this might be more readable as a wiki.
So after all, why not self publish? You have more control on what you write, you earn a lot more if you publish the book on the Kindle for every sold copy, you are free to provide the book for free on the web, and so forth.
From this point of view github is a viable way to handle the writing of a book. What is needed is a license that allows everybody to contribute, so that the electronic version is free for everybody, but only the "main" authors have the right to use the book for commercial purposes (Kindle, Printed, ...). Otherwise if the book is under a non free license it can be still interesting to use github in a public repository to get feedbacks, comments, and so forth.
We'll see what happens but my next book will be a self-published one for sure, written using a github public repo, if I'll ever write another one :)
Nice! When do you think that's going to be out? (Horrible question to ask an author I know.) And if it's not self published, who is publishing it?
The problem is that self publishing is a lot of work if you want to do it properly. It requires a large up-front investment, which is difficult to justify if you're only going to write a book or two. I spent months learning the publishing business, building the processes and the software. To support my continuous publishing ideas, I built a fully-automated workflow based around DocBook, from which I produce print, screen, and various other digital formats. While I enjoyed all of it, most people wouldn't. I was also lucky to have the support of my wife, who is actually managing the company, as well as the sales and marketing activities.
Experiencing all this, we are now transforming our publishing company to to provide low-cost support to authors who wish to keep control and a big chunk of their royalties, but also to focus on writing (rather than publishing and the other repetitive activities). Lean is the word here, and we pass most of the savings to authors. That's where I think the future of technical publishing will be.
I help manage a large publishers proprietary platform for online textbooks. We use svn to hold all of our books. We then serve them to their site in an online reading app.
If we were to remove the front end and point users to our svn repo I doubt one could call that publishing. Sure we would be providing informtion, but until we add the wrapper that makes it useful, it is not published. Could you call an unbound book published?
Providing that platform for reading creates more value for the user. It also makes it easier for the author to pass their value through their publisher to the reader.
Where does the publishing come into play?
The rule should be IMHO: first write then understand how to publish. This gives the power to the author. The other way around gives the power to the publisher.
There are issues of formats, making it easy to find with search, marketing and metadata to name a few.
Serious question: How would this be different (and better) than Wikibooks from the Wikimedia foundation?
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Copyrights#Contributo...
Your submissions are automatically and irrevocably licensed GFDL and CC-BY-SA. Copyright isn't transferred, but since you cannot revoke the licensing you have (in effect) given up ownership.