Hard copy publishing of the guides

[Corey Burger]

On 4/5/06, Matthew East <matthew.east at breathe.com> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> Robert Stoffers suggested via irc yesterday that it would be nice to set
> up some kind of mechanism for making hard copies of guides available. I
> think it's a really good idea. He suggested a publisher
> http://www.lulu.com which will make copies of the book as they are
> bought. So what happens is that if someone wants to buy a copy of the
> book, they pay, lulu publishes the copy, and sends it. It has the
> advantages that:
>
>  * There is no risk of people not buying the book, because only copies
> which are actually bought are produced.
>  * It's free for us because the customer pays the cost of production
>  * We have pdf versions, so we would simply send them that, and maybe
> ask the art team to produce a cover design.
>
> As far as I can see, there is no real reason not to look into this. As
> Corey pointed out, yes there are other books available, but I think that
> there may be people who will want to read our guides on hard copy, and
> since giving them the possibility to do so is free for us and involves
> no risk, I don't see why we shouldn't do it.
>
> What do others think?
>
> Matt

As Matt mentioned, I raised a few concerns. They break down into two categories:

1 - Completeness

The Desktop Guide is far from a complete guide. It is good at what is
covers, but has major holes in it. I would be embarrased to charge for
it. It will also be compared, as a book, to the other Ubuntu books on
the market. Lions and Circuses come to mind. The result will not be
pretty for us.

2 - Dilution of Market

We already have an official Ubuntu book. We are the official Ubuntu
Doc Team. Having the official doc team publishing a book which is not
the official book like quite amateurish. (For full disclosure, I am on
the authors on the official book, but that has ABSOLUTLEY NOTHING to
do with what I am saying here)

Basically, the problem boils down to making us look bad. Unless
Canonical blesses something like this, which I don't seem them doing,
it looks like we don't have our ducks in a row.  Prentice Hall is
going out a bit of limb to publish this Ubuntu book and release it
under our licenses. Putting our stuff on Lulu would be basically
shooting them in the back.

So in summary, lets not tread down this path right now. Our first
foray into printed publishing should be with an amazing product, not
as an afterthought.  I really like the idea of Lulu for Dapper+1. We
can merge the desktop guide and the official book and have something
truly great to offer for low cost.

Corey