Petter Reinholdtsen

Entries from August 2015.

In my hand, a pocket book edition of the Norwegian Free Culture book!
19th August 2015

Today, finally, my first printed draft edition of the Norwegian translation of Free Culture I have been working on for the last few years arrived in the mail. I had to fake a cover to get the interior printed, and the exterior of the book look awful, but that is irrelevant at this point. I asked for a printed pocket book version to get an idea about the font sizes and paper format as well as how good the figures and images look in print, but also to test what the pocket book version would look like. After receiving the 500 page pocket book, it became obvious to me that that pocket book size is too small for this book. I believe the book is too thick, and several tables and figures do not look good in the size they get with that small page sizes. I believe I will go with the 5.5x8.5 inch size instead. A surprise discovery from the paper version was how bad the URLs look in print. They are very hard to read in the colophon page. The URLs are red in the PDF, but light gray on paper. I need to change the color of links somehow to look better. But there is a printed book in my hand, and it feels great. :)

Now I only need to fix the cover, wrap up the postscript with the store behind the book, and collect the last corrections from the proof readers before the book is ready for proper printing. Cover artists willing to work for free and create a Creative Commons licensed vector file looking similar to the original is most welcome, as my skills as a graphics designer are mostly missing.

Tags: docbook, english, freeculture.
First paper version of the Norwegian Free Culture book heading my way
9th August 2015

Typesetting a book is harder than I hoped. As the translation is mostly done, and a volunteer proof reader was going to check the text on paper, it was time this summer to focus on formatting my translated docbook based version of the Free Culture book by Lawrence Lessig. I've been trying to get both docboox-xsl+fop and dblatex to give me a good looking PDF, but in the end I went with dblatex, because its Debian maintainer and upstream developer were responsive and very helpful in solving my formatting challenges.

Last night, I finally managed to create a PDF that no longer made Lulu.com complain after uploading, and I ordered a text version of the book on paper. It is lacking a proper book cover and is not tagged with the correct ISBN number, but should give me an idea what the finished book will look like.

Instead of using Lulu, I did consider printing the book using CreateSpace, but ended up using Lulu because it had smaller book size options (CreateSpace seem to lack pocket book with extended distribution). I looked for a similar service in Norway, but have not seen anything so far. Please let me know if I am missing out on something here.

But I still struggle to decide the book size. Should I go for pocket book (4.25x6.875 inches / 10.8x17.5 cm) with 556 pages, Digest (5.5x8.5 inches / 14x21.6 cm) with 323 pages or US Trade (6x8 inches / 15.3x22.9 cm) with 280 pages? Fewer pager give a cheaper book, and a smaller book is easier to carry around. The test book I ordered was pocket book sized, to give me an idea how well that fit in my hand, but I suspect I will end up using a digest sized book in the end to bring the prize down further.

My biggest challenge at the moment is making nice cover art. My inkscape skills are not yet up to the task of replicating the original cover in SVG format. I also need to figure out what to write about the book on the back (will most likely use the same text as the description on web based book stores). I would love help with this, if you are willing to license the art source and final version using the same CC license as the book. My artistic skills are not really up to the task.

I plan to publish the book in both English and Norwegian and on paper, in PDF form as well as EPUB and MOBI format. The current status can as usual be found on github in the archive/ directory. So far I have spent all time on making the PDF version look good. Someone should probably do the same with the dbtoepub generated e-book. Help is definitely needed here, as I expect to run out of steem before I find time to improve the epub formatting.

Please let me know via github if you find typos in the book or discover translations that should be improved. The final proof reading is being done right now, and I expect to publish the finished result in a few months.

Tags: docbook, english, freeculture.

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