
Github, the future of book publishing? - latch
https://github.com/karlseguin/the-little-mongodb-book/network
======
hucker
Pull requests is an awesome way to fix errors and spelling mistakes, and the
fork that is aiming to translate the book to brazilian portuguese is also very
interesting.

What I really hope to see catch on though, is the format that this book is
written in. There is definitely a shortage of technical resources that is
longer and more in-depth than an online tutorial, yet shorter and more to-the-
point than the full fledged 500-pager. I feel like reading this book gave me
just enough info to make an adequately informed decision on whether or not
MongoDB is what I'm looking for and worth looking into, or that it isn't the
fit for whatever application I'm writing. Great work!

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kneath
<https://github.com/schacon/git-scribe>

Highly recommend you check this out. We're pretty interested in this idea and
definitely want to see it take off.

~~~
draegtun
Very nice.

The _Modern Perl Book_ I linked to elsewhere here also comes with publishing
tools for producing PDF, LaTex, ePub & HTML and (I believe) was used for the
finished printed book (<http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/>).

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pdenya
It would definitely be handy for technical books but I can't see this being
widely adopted because most technical books aren't free.

Fixing errors and sending a pull request via an interface we all already know
would be much easier than tracking down author contact info. Having said that
this might be more readable as a wiki.

~~~
antirez
I'm currently writing a "commercial" book (the redis book), and I'm every day
more confident that the future of many tech books is self publishing. You get
hardly rich writing a tech book for a traditional publisher, it is a lot of
work for little money most of the time (you are not going to sell, usually, a
large number of tech books, they are not "best sellers", and the percentage
you earn is very low).

So after all, why not self publish? You have more control on what you write,
you earn a lot more if you publish the book on the Kindle for every sold copy,
you are free to provide the book for free on the web, and so forth.

From this point of view github is a viable way to handle the writing of a
book. What is needed is a license that allows everybody to contribute, so that
the electronic version is free for everybody, but only the "main" authors have
the right to use the book for commercial purposes (Kindle, Printed, ...).
Otherwise if the book is under a non free license it can be still interesting
to use github in a public repository to get feedbacks, comments, and so forth.

We'll see what happens but my next book will be a self-published one for sure,
written using a github public repo, if I'll ever write another one :)

~~~
JonnieCache
_> I'm currently writing a "commercial" book (the redis book)_

Nice! When do you think that's going to be out? (Horrible question to ask an
author I know.) And if it's not self published, who is publishing it?

~~~
antirez
Not sure, but I think it will be out this summer (sorry, unable to be more
specific). It is published with O'Reilly.

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filiwickers
This is cool but I'm not sure if it's really publishing nor is it something
new.

I help manage a large publishers proprietary platform for online textbooks. We
use svn to hold all of our books. We then serve them to their site in an
online reading app.

If we were to remove the front end and point users to our svn repo I doubt one
could call that publishing. Sure we would be providing informtion, but until
we add the wrapper that makes it useful, it is not published. Could you call
an unbound book published?

Providing that platform for reading creates more value for the user. It also
makes it easier for the author to pass their value through their publisher to
the reader.

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perlgeek
writing != publishing.

Where does the publishing come into play?

~~~
latch
Publishing is about "making information available to the general public". I
think two translations to different languages and one conversion to a
different format directly accomplishes that goal.

~~~
cakeface
Uploading a file somewhere public is barely publishing.

There are issues of formats, making it easy to find with search, marketing and
metadata to name a few.

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simonsarris
This isn't _exactly_ publishing.

Serious question: How would this be different (and better) than Wikibooks from
the Wikimedia foundation?

<http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page>

~~~
jedsmith
If you put your book on Wikibooks, you don't own it.

~~~
aplusbi
Do you have a citation? I checked wikibook's Terms of Use and it didn't say
anything about giving up ownership.

~~~
jedsmith
I should have phrased it better. Thank you for making me go look.

[http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Copyrights#Contributo...](http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Copyrights#Contributors.27_rights_and_obligations)

Your submissions are automatically and irrevocably licensed GFDL and CC-BY-SA.
Copyright isn't transferred, but since you cannot revoke the licensing you
have (in effect) given up ownership.

~~~
brennen
You have in effect given out an irrevocable license to your work. This isn't
practically or legally the same as giving up ownership, though it's certainly
ceding a sizable measure of control.

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draegtun
The _Modern Perl Book_ was also written via Github:
<https://github.com/chromatic/modern_perl_book/network>

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kodablah
I wonder when people are gonna write "choose your own adventure" books w/
github. Could call it "fork your own adventure"

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freedrull
My schoolmates and I wrote a collaborative paper using git back in college. It
was great for critical feedback, sometimes we would delete each other's entire
paragraphs in a single commit.

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joshuacc
I've no idea if it would be work, but I'd love to see a web app for authors
and editors that used git on the back end to manage things.

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banooker
Sounds familiar:

<http://www.inkling.com/blog/art-content-engineering/>

