On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 11:46 PM, Sumant Srivathsan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Very, very, very involved exercise. What you're talking about is to create > an online repository of multimedia content related to his book. While the > idea is not new at all, it's something that many publishers tend to avoid > doing because of the amount of work involved. It could take anything from a > couple of months to a year to put the stuff up the way you're describing it. > OTOH, a PDF is a good starting point, but it will do precious little online > if the supporting material is not available as well.
The first question to ask is how "free" is the digital version of the book going to be? Is it free as in beer? Or free as in re-mixable? Or free as in redistribute, but do not change? Putting the contents of the book in PDF format is perhaps not the best way to begin because of the unweildy nature of PDF. Spend a little bit of time making it available in some common denominator of a format (say, docbook) and HTML. And let your engaged audience convert it to different other formats (ebook, audio, etc.). Getting permissions from rights holders of the celluloid art referenced in the book is going to be very time consuming as Sumant says. Build a blog / wiki around the book where your audience can add footnotes and links to online multimedia elsewhere (youtube, flickr, etc.) around the celluloid media the book is referencing. Generate interest among your readers and get them to translate the work into other languages. Let people make mashups with your work..... Thaths -- "I saw this in a movie about a bus that had to SPEED around a city, keeping its SPEED over fifty, and if its SPEED dropped, it would explode. I think it was called, 'The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down'." -- Homer J. Simpson
