<!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.5//EN"
"http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.5/docbookx.dtd">
<chapter label="" id="c-about-this-edition">
+
<title>About this edition</title>
+
+ <para>
+This edition of <citetitle>Free Culture</citetitle> is the result of
+three years of volunteer work. The idea came from a discussion I had
+around ten years ago with a friend about the copyright debate in
+Norway, and how rarely the negative sides of stronger copyright
+regulation are mentioned in public. The summer of 2012 I finally had
+a look again at the idea and decided to publish a Norwegian Bokmål
+edition of <citetitle>Free Culture</citetitle>, translated and
+formatted by volunteers, as it describes the problem area very well.
+This new English edition is a by-product of this translation project.
+ </para>
+
+ <para>
+Thanks to the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, I already had
+experience translating Docbook documents, and it seemed like a good
+format for this book too. I found a Docbook formatted version of the
+book created by Hans Schou, and after some work I was able to
+transform it to into a book. This was the start of the translation
+project. I added a way to create both English and Bokmål versions,
+and called for volunteers to help me with the translation.
+ </para>
+
<para>
-This new edition of <citetitle>Free Culture</citetitle> is published
-by volunteers as part of a project to translate the book to Norwegian
-bokmål.
+Several people joined, and the following even helped with the English
+version. Ralph Amissah and his SiSu version provided index entries.
+Morten Sickel and Alexander Alemayhu helped with the figures,
+redrawing some of the bitmaps as vector images. Håkon Wium Lie helped
+me track down a good replacement font without usage restrictions
+instead of the one in the original edition. The typesetting is done
+using dblatex, which was selected over the alternatives thanks to the
+invaluable and quick help from Benoît Guillon and Andreas Hoenen.
+Thomas Gramstad helped me understand the ISBN system, so I could get
+the ISBN numbers needed make book store distribution possible. Marc
+Jeanmougin from the inkscape community helped me replicate the
+original front cover.
</para>
+
+ <para>
+The support from Lawrence Lessig has been valuable, and I am very glad
+for his prompt and positive response. I am impressed he still had the
+original screen shots, more than eleven years after the book was
+published for the first time.
+ </para>
+
+ <para>
+I am very grateful to Mari and the rest of my family for their
+patience with me in this project.
+ </para>
+
<para>
-– Petter Reinholdtsen, Oslo 2015-10-11
+– Petter Reinholdtsen, Oslo 2015-10-15
</para>
</chapter>
projects / text-free-culture-lessig.git / blobdiff