books

I'm in the middle of a transition away from proprietary tools. Tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, Omnigraffle, Pages, Keynote - these tools have been helpful in the past, but I see the need to incorporate a proprietary tool in an open source book as a failure for two reasons:

• Proprietary tools increase the barrier to entry for potential contributors. If you show up at an open source project only to learn that you'll need to purchase an expensive set of tools it limits the extent of your involvement.
• Many of these proprietary tools don't work on Linux (and I've let a few tools into my life that only work on OSX). I moved my life to OSX a few years ago, and while I'm not about to abandon the platform, I don't feel great binding open source projects to a particular platform. Again, if you show up at an open source project only to learn that you have to create graphs in some OSX-specific tool like Omnigraffle, it limits participation.

What is a good example project?   What do you look for when you are reading documentation?   Are you looking for a project that almost exactly resembles the problem you are trying to solve?  Or, are you looking for something that is going to get you interested even if it might not seem directly relevant to your problem?   These are some of the questions I'm asked by startups looking to seed a new project with compelling documentation.   What examples should we use in our documentation? 

Here are some strategies that I've seen (and some I've used) in my time writing documentation:

I've switched a number of books over to 8.5" x 11" format. Although this is not a traditional size for computer books (most computer books are around 7"x 9"), moving to 8.5" x 11" reduces page count for printing conserving resources and reducing cost. I've found it much cheaper to print books on 50-weight 8.5x11 vs. 60-weight 7x9. While, I'm comfortable with DocBook XSL, I dread FO, and the idea of configuring the XSL to create two-column FO is very possible, but wasn't something I wanted to jump into without first evaluating InDesign's support for columns.

One important thing to consider if you are planning on writing a free book is the license for the work. Traditional software licenses have some clauses that are not relevant to books or electronic media. Lessig's Creative Commons makes sense because he wrote it with books in mind. So where a license like Apache or GPL talks about "binaries" and "source", Creative Commons talks about "works" being "published".

Where Lulu Works

• Domestic Distribution (US): - I'm frequently sending 40 book shipments throughout the US and Europe. Domestic distribution is a big win for Lulu. Although the site itself states that it should take between 3 and 5 days to print a book, I find that it is consistently taking about 3 days to print an order.