It depends on whether you plan to read the technical book front to cover in one go or use it as a reference. E-book readers are not very good for the latter, because it's painful to quickly "thumb through" the pages of the book to find something. There's no match for a paper book for that.
Carlos de la Guardia On Sat, Feb 13, 2010 at 2:36 AM, Chris McDonough <chr...@plope.com> wrote: > On 2/12/10 2:50 PM, Iain Duncan wrote: >> Hey, that's great news about the book. > > Thanks! > >> Do you know if it will be >> available as an e-book at all? Not sure how long that publisher would >> take to get things out of country and all. It is also quite expensive, >> but having formerly worked in the book industry I understand the many >> factors influencing price there... ;-) > > Offering a PDF will be super easy; the book typesetting was done to PDF. > Making a PDF available for download that is optimized for online reading is > something I'll do after PyCon is over the week after next. At this point, the > printed book will hopefully have broken even cost-wise. > > If you'd rather get a PDF rendering more quickly, you just need to 1) install > this version of sphinx: http://bitbucket.org/chrism/sphinx/ 2) install LaTeX > 3) > type the magic commands to generate a PDF from the docs source files: "make > latex && cd .build/latex && make all") and out will pop a PDF. > > On the other hand, it will require a good amount of typsetting effort to make > the book easy to read on an ereader like Kindle or Nook or an iPhone. To make > it available for Nook/iPhone, I'd need to publish it in "epub" format. There > is a Sphinx writer for the epub format, but its output against the current > book > source is truly miserable. I worry a little that offering it as-is would give > the wrong image of the content: I'd want it to be typeset better before even > offering it for free. There is no Sphinx Kindle writer, but there are > utilities to convert epub to Kindle format. > > I'm curious if anyone actually uses an ereader like Kindle/Nook or an epub > reader on their iPhone like Stanza to regularly read technical publications? > It looks like reading anything except a novel on one would be an excruciating > exercise, at least in an emulator on my screen. > > -- > Chris McDonough > Agendaless Consulting, Fredericksburg VA > The repoze.bfg Web Application Framework Book: http://bfg.repoze.org/book > _______________________________________________ > Repoze-dev mailing list > Repoze-dev@lists.repoze.org > http://lists.repoze.org/listinfo/repoze-dev > _______________________________________________ Repoze-dev mailing list Repoze-dev@lists.repoze.org http://lists.repoze.org/listinfo/repoze-dev
