Re: [Audacity-devel] Audacity 1.4.0 Manual

[Vaughan J. <va...@au...>]

Robin, sounds great to me! Splendid ideas and ethics.

We'll discuss. Thanks for your interest in Audacity.

Happy New Year!

-Vaughan


Robin 'Roblimo' Miller wrote:
>> It would be very useful to be able to point users of the beta versions
>> to the manual, even in it's current unfinished state in order to explain
>> new features and the like, as well as getting feedback, however Gale and
>> I are reluctant to do so until a read-only face is available, so we
>> don't end up with a large pool of relatively ill-informed people making
>> edits to the manual with no real control.
>>     
>
> Here's another, additional thought about making an Audacity manual.
>
> OSTG (owner of SourceForge.net) and Pearson (Prentice Hall, Wiley, Sams, 
> Que, etc.) recently signed a deal to create SourceForge.net Press. This 
> deal, while no secret, has not yet been publicized.
>
> We're going to use PoD (Print on Demand) and eBook technology to produce 
> professional-quality manuals for fast-moving open source projects. And 
> any manuals that look they'll be popular enough for real print runs and 
> traditional book retailing... POOF! We turn the switch and those titles 
> appear in major bookstores far faster than is possible with current 
> print book publishing.
>
> We had a little editorial teleconference just before Christmas, with 
> OSTG editors and Prentice Hall editors on the phone, and our consensus 
> was that Audacity would be a great first title for SourceForge Press.
>
> Some of this is bias: everybody who was on that call uses Audacity and 
> likes it. :)
>
> But the rest of the judgment was based on our belief that Audacity can 
> and should be much more popular than it is, and that a 
> professionally-produced manual with OSTG's and Pearson's combined sales 
> muscle behind it would help make it so.
>
> This could also be a source of income for the project and/or for 
> individual "inner circle" developers and the current documentation 
> producers, since we will pay substantial royalties.
>
> We can either supply a co-author or Audacity people can do the writing 
> (which is really already being done on the wiki), while we do the 
> editing/design/marketing.
>
> Note that we are not necessarily going to stick to standard book 
> publisher copyright; Mark Taub, on the Pearson side of the deal, has 
> handled a number of books (including the Bruce Perens series) release 
> under Creatice Commons and Free Documentation licenses. And our attitude 
> toward DRM is that we hate it ourselves, and a SourceForge/Slashdot-type 
> audience is going to break it anyway, so let's not. :)
>
> So how about it? Interested? You can reply off-list, although we're 
> perfectly happy to have the entire book development process, include $$ 
> negotiations, take place on an archived, public list.
>
> Happy New Year!
>
> Robin 'Roblimo' Miller
> Editor in Chief, OSTG
>
>