Thank you

Frederick

I’m in the “very” “very” early stages of trying to write a book about my travels. I blogged a fair bit while I was travelling, and am now trying to expand on that and put together a book about our experience.

I have zero budget for this project and it essentially a hobby at this point, so I’m also running Ubuntu and want to use Open Office – so was interested to hear your experience.

I am also a big fan of Leo, and his TWiT podcasts. Have been listening to you guys on FLOSS weekly lately. Great show – keep it up.

I am writing the book on an Ubuntu >laptop and using OpenOffice.org version 3.0.

So basically, youve been doing the same thing my 70 year old mum has been doing for 3-4 years now? How avant garde you are.

And its not an Ubuntu laptop. You meant to say its a Mac laptop running Ubuntu, you freedom hater ;-0

So you’re using FLOSS tools in your writing workflow and you negociated a particular Creative Commons license for the release of book itself…

The next step is probably investigating how you can convince O’reilly to make use of a non-restricted font in the final typesetting itself (regardless of the internal toolset they choose to use): picking font software under a community-recognized FLOSS license seems right for the content of such a book. I highly recommend an open font coming out of the collaborative community process as described in the book itself. It sends the right message.

There are quite a few quality open fonts that should fit your needs in the Europe tab of: http://unifont.org/fontguide/

We’ve worked on packaging them in Debian upstream and/or in Ubuntu.

How about being the first O’reilly author whose book has a colophon mentioning open fonts being used instead of the usual restricted ones? Wouldn’t that validate the premise of the book and set a great precedent?

Or maybe you’re OK with the deeply ironic contradiction of advocating a collaborative community model with restricted means of expression…

Think about it.

Here’s an example of a colophon mentioning an open font: “The Cultural significance of Free Software” http://twobits.net/cover/

Nice idea, but there are many reasons why this is difficult.

First of all, writing a completely collaborative book in itself is impossibly difficult. I have worked before on similar projects and they never really work out. Its a lot harder than you would imagine to do and is not just a case of setting up a wiki. Style guidelines, consistency of tone, deciding on an outline, sticking to that outline, avoid biased opinion, avoiding conflicting opinion: all of these are challenges. I am not saying it impossible, but it is bloody hard, and as I allude to later, I just don’t have the time to coordinate this with my other commitments.

Secondly, and to be frank, I wanted to write my own book. This is for two reasons. First, I want to define the topics and concepts that my experience has taught works well, but to expand and illustrate on these topics with stories from others. Many of the stories that I have received have done this well. Secondly, as I said earlier, I simply don’t have time to coordinate a full collaborative book writing project. Its hard enough to write a full book in three months, let alone coordinating a community to write that book, so I needed to make a decision simply based on time.

Thirdly, the money is complex. I am not getting paid much of an advance for this book (most books don’t pay well): the reason I am doing it is because I want to write the book. In a full collaborative project this would be a nightmare. How would you split the money? Based on word count? What about sections that don’t need much writing but lots of research? If you paid based on time, how would you count the time? Also, how would you actually pay people? Wire transfers are expensive. How do you deal with tax for all of these contributors, and in different countries? What about tiny contributions: if someone writes a paragraph and they earned $1, how exactly can you wire that? This is a huge burden for a publisher and the project leader to track.

Not everything needs a community approach. This is a book that distils my experience and illustrates much of that insight with a variety of stories. Its one take on community that people can either buy or download for free. Sounds like a reasonable deal to me.

Jono