For the last couple months I've been quietly working on a publishing deal for KDE books. I now have a contract in hand and we're making our way to Making It Happen. The number of books under this deal would be significant: 3 250 pagers, 15 100 pagers. That's a lot of writing.
We get to pick the topics and the books will be sold as eBooks both on the publisher's site as well as Amazon (well, pending that part of the deal also going through, but it looks good at this point). Print-on-demand for dead tree versions will also be made available. The intended audiences are end users, developers and/or IT professionals.
Due to the increased efficiency of the digital format, the authors will get a rather healthy commission (above typical industry rates) and KDE e.V. will receive a portion of proceeds as a good-will donation from the publisher.
We have collected a small group of three who will oversee the project, but now I need to start gathering a stable of authors to actually write these books. With that in place and some contract polishing, we can sign off on it and start writing KDE books.
So, if you have decent writing chops (in English), knowledge of KDE and the commitment to pound out 100 pages or more of material (text + images and what not), please email me with your topic idea and I can share further details with you and we can figure out together if it's a good fit for you.
As for non-English versions, translations are a "next phase of the project" item.
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8 comments:
Is there a possibility to translate the books on the fly. I think there a quite some volunteers for the bigger national communitys.
What's about a django-book-style of writing with peer review all along the way?
I can do English to Dutch, but not my own text!
Pragprog beta books?
@Panke: yes, i think we can do translations quite effectively by tapping our huge international community.
*but* it still takes some organization and coordination effort, *and* we have a limited amount of that.
so i decided to start simple first, get that part right, then add the next bits such as translation.
translation, however, has been on the agenda from the beginning.
I'd be willing to edit after the decent chops are down. Enjoyed working with Jos on the guide recently, and KDE 4 is tops.
Thanks for everything you do Aaron.
You should use http://lulu.com it's way more simple and easy to publish and you get a huge commission.
@patcito
Lulu is own by Amazon so if big A would be in this deal, dead trees version will be probably executed by Lulu.
Just my guessing.
@mikmach:
Lulu.com is not owned by Amazon (were you thinking about CreateSpace?).
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