1 Title: First paper version of the Norwegian Free Culture book heading my way
2 Tags: english, docbook, freeculture
5 <p>Typesetting a book is harder than I hoped. As the translation is
6 mostly done, and a volunteer proof reader was going to check the text
7 on paper, it was time this summer to focus on formatting my translated
8 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> based version of the
9 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> book by Lawrence
10 Lessig. I've been trying to get both docboox-xsl+fop and dblatex to
11 give me a good looking PDF, but in the end I went with dblatex, because
12 its Debian maintainer and upstream developer were responsive and very
13 helpful in solving my formatting challenges.</p>
15 <p>Last night, I finally managed to create a PDF that no longer made
16 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/">Lulu.com</a> complain after uploading,
17 and I ordered a text version of the book on paper. It is lacking a
18 proper book cover and is not tagged with the correct ISBN number, but
19 should give me an idea what the finished book will look like.</p>
21 <p>Instead of using Lulu, I did consider printing the book using
22 <a href="http://www.createspace.com/">CreateSpace</a>, but ended up
23 using Lulu because it had smaller book size options (CreateSpace seem
24 to lack pocket book with extended distribution). I looked for a
25 similar service in Norway, but have not seen anything so far. Please
26 let me know if I am missing out on something here.</p>
28 <p>But I still struggle to decide the book size. Should I go for
29 pocket book (4.25x6.875 inches / 10.8x17.5 cm) with 556 pages, Digest
30 (5.5x8.5 inches / 14x21.6 cm) with 323 pages or US Trade (6x8 inches /
31 15.3x22.9 cm) with 280 pages? Fewer pager give a cheaper book, and a
32 smaller book is easier to carry around. The test book I ordered was
33 pocket book sized, to give me an idea how well that fit in my hand,
34 but I suspect I will end up using a digest sized book in the end to
35 bring the prize down further.</p>
37 <p>My biggest challenge at the moment is making nice cover art. My
38 inkscape skills are not yet up to the task of replicating the original
39 cover in SVG format. I also need to figure out what to write about
40 the book on the back (will most likely use the same text as the
41 description on web based book stores). I would love help with this,
42 if you are willing to license the art source and final version using
43 the same CC license as the book. My artistic skills are not really up
46 <p>I plan to publish the book in both English and Norwegian and on
47 paper, in PDF form as well as EPUB and MOBI format. The current
48 status can as usual be found on
49 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
50 in the archive/ directory. So far I have spent all time on making the
51 PDF version look good. Someone should probably do the same with the
52 dbtoepub generated e-book. Help is definitely needed here, as I
53 expect to run out of steem before I find time to improve the epub
56 <p>Please let me know via github if you find typos in the book or
57 discover translations that should be improved. The final proof
58 reading is being done right now, and I expect to publish the finished
59 result in a few months.</p>