On Sat, 2005-01-29 at 04:49 +0530, A. Mani wrote: > For BF'05, our intention will be promote OSS and linux in particular > among people who R/W > books and may be in DTP or publishing. We can try for some projects too > with some of them.
Then why are we inside an IT company stall ? Book publishers are probably not going to come to Amar PC stall to look for the next machine they are going to buy to run QuarkXpress ! We should then be looking at seminars targeted towards publishers, preferably at the Book Fair, but more likely someplace near College Street. > >2> Who is the audience? > > > > > Mixed...cut across classes...We must target everybody. Note that much of ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > the publishing industry is still to come to terms with software. Impossible !! We simply do not have the manpower and will to target all sections. We have to take a target audience (I propose we tackle students this time) and then build awareness about Linux within that section. Chasing a lot of different sections of people is just going to waste valuable human resources. > >3> How do we address them? and > > > >4> What do we gain out of this? > > > > > It will help a lot if we address them from the point of view of > publishing...in the broader sense in which it has progressed. Naturally > basic aspects of sanity of OSes come in. I'm not a publishing expert. If the focus of the LUG is going to be Linux awareness of the publishers at the Book Fair, I feel my presence will not be profitable to the LUG in any way, since I cannot contribute in any way. It's better that this topic came up. If the final decision is made to address publishers, I'll not add to the crowd in front of the computers. (Believe me, there will be huge crowds, specially when Free [as in beer] software is being shown) > If we have economic plans then we gain directly. If we do a bit in > sanitizing world orders, then we gain otherwise we will lose heavily in > the future. The BF is a movement. Ours will grow too as a consequence of > our participation. We still have some democracy left in the world and > must utilise it to annihilate the forces of imperialism in various > guises and in various sectors. We can do more petit economic projects if > we desire...that is for direct petit gains. ??? I'm not a political activist, and I cannot give political speeches. IMHO, if we really need to target publishers: 1. We need to get people volunteering to work of publishing tools like Scribus (especially w.r.t. l10n, Indic language support, etc.) This is because we have to approach the local publishers first. The larger houses are more likely to ask their durwans to escort us out of the gate unless we demonstrate our ability to guide and manage transition from an existing Windows/Mac based environment to Linux. Oh ! Did I tell you that Scribus has problems rendering Indic scripts AFAIR ?? 2. At the cost of angering some members of the community, I suggest we get over the fixation with Tex. It's fine for technical documents, but tech docs are not published by ordinary publishers. An trust me, even Latex is scary enough for non-technical publishers 3. Work out the cost benefits of moving to Linux based production systems for the publishers, including cost for training and support. There is also the question of who's going to provide support. I don't think there will be many people volunteering to go to a publishing house whenever they face a problem and solve it. What good is a truly free publishing system, if the publisher can't properly use it to publish the next book ? I personally think that instead of targeting publishers in the Book Fair, where they'll be busy trying to sell as many books as they possibly can, and instead talk to Publishers' and Booksellers' Guild to organise a joint seminar for the publishers to promote Linux. Let's adopt a "horses for course" strategy. -- Soumyadip Modak [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://soumyadip.blogspot.com -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body "unsubscribe ilug-cal" and an empty subject line. FAQ: http://www.ilug-cal.org/node.php?id=3
