On 20 April 2013 18:25, Frank Lanitz <frank@frank.uvena.de> wrote:

Am 19.04.2013 15:07, schrieb Lex Trotman:

> Yes, packt exists and publishes books on computing topics. However I
> don't think much of their quality. And their spamming methods to find
> authors are questionable. A quick web search shows they do the same to
> many projects.

It appears they have some system of generating automatic "reminder"
mails. I received a number of these during the last days and I really
lost the last interest of maybe doing a project with them.

> My concern is the potential impact on the Geany community, unless
> everyone agrees, if one person writes the book and gets paid, even a
> little, others may feel that they have been used, answering questions on
> the ML and IRC.
>
> And the benefit to the community is likely to only be greater support
> requirements.

I don't see this in that way: Generally putting information into a book
is a good chance to review current documentation and can bring back
import for improving the general manual. Also it's a chance to explain
things in a different way via a different medium. E.g. I got some
smaller patches for documentation based on just translating them into
German.

Yes, agree it can be, but only if the author actually does improvements to the documentation at the same time, and avoids copyright snags with the publishers. My experience of publishing deadlines are such that they almost certainly won't have time to touch the documentation whilst writing.

Also I don't see the "being used" as very problematic thing. Writing a
(good) book is not the same as answering on IRC. In fact, putting
information into a good technical one is much more about writing skills
and description/explaining skills (and I think most of us are really
sucking at these).

I'm not trying to belittle the effort a writer would put into explaining a program, and they definitely should get paid for that, but they have to understand it first, and if they use a lot of ML and IRC time to do that, well, thats where those answering can feel "hey we've contributed a lot here, and we don't get anything". Thats just human nature I'm afraid :)

Also if you are not the coder kind of person, writing a book -- given
that somebody is liking to spent money for -- might be a good way to pay
the rent on one hand and improve free software on the other hand. (Many
people just take software serious, if there are books about it.... just
have a look onto public library and count how many books about $software
you will find and have a look which software they are about)

And how many you glance at and put back on the shelf :) A computer book author might pay a few months rent (for a cheap apartment), but shouldn't bank on much more.

BUT of course: if a book just puts content from IRC/manual between two
book covers, the book is not needed, waste of time for author and editor
and ppl from community will feel used -- me included.

Ok, so I'm a grumpy old so-and-so for seeing this outcome first :)

But then I have seen it before, so I am just offering a warning. Geany has a good community, we don't want to divide it, thats why the community needs to agree that a particular person should write it and that yes they will offer support. Or of course, decide not.

And if the book is successful in bringing new Geany users, we need to understand that they will need support as well. The people who would be using such a book, "Geany IDE - Starter" are not going to add to the support staff, much less the code, for a long time.

So... I understand your censors, but I don't agree in all of them ;)

And thats perfectly all right, differing views are what makes life interesting :)

Cheers

Lex

Cheers,
Frank

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