[email protected] schrieb:
Publishing a book costs money. Be it in PDF or printed.
I don't see such costs. Webspace is needed for the documentation as
well as for the project itself, and an advertisement can be put into
the project's homepage.
Selling copies is more complicated, but not a real cost factor.
You obviously don't have a clue about how to create and sell quality books.
Actually selling copies is the biggest cost.
Sorry for my inprecise formulation. I meant "selling" in contrast to
giving away for free, and "copies" only instead of downloads.
Here are some of the costs involved:
[...]
You see that I didn't include any author's fee yet. After all the above
costs, not much is left. The author gets the smallest part of the book's
price.
ACK :-(
I'd assign most of the work to the authors, because structuring
*technical* content and translations IMO can not be done by somebody
else, regardless of according skills. In detail translations should be
done by the community, where native speakers also are familiar with the
technical details of the text. The community also can contribute to the
structure of a book, because the users (readers) often have needs or
expectations *different* from the insiders view on the topics.
Yes, you even don't have some of the above costs with PDF (as you
propose). But then, all you have in the end is just a PDF.
PDF was not my idea, and in that particular format I miss means for
updates or personal notes or extensions. Wiki format lacks any
structure, what makes it very hard to find or collect specific
documentation in dedicated places. I'd be happier with HTML, where it's
easier to update and reorganize the entire "book", but this again
doesn't allow for book-style sequential reading. Dunno about eBook
features at all.
One can of course ask whether all this is worth it for a technical
publication. A rightful question. The answer is a very personal
decision, and that is the risk the editor takes when (s)he decides to
publish a book: it may or may not sell. The costs remain the same.
That's the difference between commercial and free projects/products: A
commercial application only sells with adequate documentation, not for
its outstanding technical features. It also sells only when it's easy to
install and configure. This is what not only I miss with FPC and Lazarus.
DoDi
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