How about printing this material in a soft cover book for us??

wschumaker@aol.com

Check out:

Database Programming
OpenOffice.org Base & Basic

By:
Roberto Benitez

www.lulu.com

Hi :slight_smile:
The guides are available in soft-cover from Lulu book-stores.
Occasionally there is a code to get a reduction on the cover price but
it's around £16/book anyway. I got a couple of copies of the Getting
Started Guide. If you contact "Friends of OpenDocument" they might be
able to get a reduction for active contributors or for specific
purposes. Jean or someone might be able to help you with contact
details for them.

Book sales help generate a small revenue for the community and i think
that fund is managed by "Friends of OpenDocument". My guess is that
if the fund grows large enough then some might be donated directly to
the TDF. It's useful to have the funds available easily to cover the
costs of getting the newer guides into the store and getting into
other stores, without having to first raise a huge discussion in some
other mailing list that might not be aware of the issues.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Jean,

Is it possible to get Amazon.com to stock hard/soft copy and Google Books to
stock soft copy (they already support PDF in addition to epub.) It would would
not be bad to see if Barnes and Noble as well as Kobo would also stock the
soft copy for their Ebook Readers as well. This would certainly assist with in
reaching new users particularly if they are provided for free and would
provide some great advertising as well.

I know Amazon and Google have programs to self publish but I have not actually
tried them out though.

Is anyone interested is publishing them in epub or mobi? I would like to learn
how to format and produce epub so if someone knows how and wants to lead this
then I am willing to port some chapters!

Tim

Sorry, I had intended to reply on-list, as Tim's questions were
addressed to the list.

I have one comment in addition to what I've said below: Bruce Byfield,
who is writing a book on styles and templates (titled "Designing with
LibreOffice"), should have some very relevant and valuable comments to
make on the subject of conversion to ebook formats, among other
topics.

--Jean

Jean,

I just setup a Google Books Partner account there are no directly payable fees
associated with distributing content. Their is a profit splitting agreement for
sales, but the Partner (In this case me) has full control to establish price)
Free! as well as establish all DRM functions (None). The partner also has
control for configuring advertising as well but they are required and Google
does pay profit sharing for advertisement usages.

Google currently supports, PDF, epub as well as scanned hard copy.

Currently their are no LibreoOffice Titles available on Google Play Books.

If their is no current LibreOffice Official initiative to establish a partner
account and distribute the content and no license restriction preventing me
from doing so then I will go ahead and distribute the manuals through my
account for the low price of Free, with DRM disabled of course.

There are some optimization requirements/recommendations as well as caveats
related to hyperlinks. located here:
https://support.google.com/books/partner/answer/107073?hl=en&ref_topic=3238502

I will start working on optimizing the manuals and brand the optimized PDF
versions as The Google Edition,

Please let me know if this is something LibreOffice would or would not like to
take on officially at this time. If it is not something you are interested in
taking on I will start submitting the latest manuals "Non-Google Play Edition
of course tomorrow.

Tim

Jean,

I decided I wanted to go ahead and try out The Google Books Partnership
Publishing, I went ahead and published The LibreOffice 4.0 Getting Started Guide
in its official non-modified state to Google Books and Google Play for the low
price of FREE with no DRM. Google Is currently processing it for full text
search/indexing it is set to become available immediately upon finishing and it
will be available in PDF download format from Google Play/Books as well. I was
also able to advertise the printed version from Lulu as well.

I will send out the URL for it when I goes online, The process is pretty fast
and relatively easy.

I will look at publishing the rest of them after I see how this one turns out.

Also the partnership Publishing accounts can be configured for multiple
administrators to ease management/updates etc.

Tim

Jean,

I attempted to upload the .ODT version hoping to make it an additional
available format for download but Google currently rejects that file type. It
is limited to PDF, epub as well as cover art in jpeg/gif.

Tim

Jean,

After looking through The Google Books Partnership Publishing configuration, I
found that it is required to submit Tax Payment forms, as well as setup bank
account info etc for payment prior to them allowing any materials to be
published live even if they are being sold for free due to the mandated
advertising agreement.

I just conveniently took care of this and I am now the sole proprietor of a
personally owned publishing company, at least on paper anyway. Google is going
to send a test transaction to my bank account for verification so it may take
up to one week to finish up the legalities, which is not bad as it will give me
time to upload the rest of the manuals and covers, populate the info etc so
they may all be available next week hopefully depending on how long the full
text search/indexing process takes.

Tim

Hello Tim,

If, at any stage, you find PDF too inflexible, take a look at Sigil: https://code.google.com/p/sigil/

It's a free cross-platform epub creation application that I've found to be quite excellent. It doesn't have a very steep learning curve and I've created and modified many epub files that have been problematic with Calibre.

Regards,

Martin

Jean,

According to Google The getting started guide is now live and online in The
PE, US and VE sales regions. I am currently not able to located it though
through their search tools.

I did find that there is another group that has uploaded some but not all of
the manuals under the Google Play Books Textbooks. They are missing covers and
have other minor issues though but they did get ISBN Numbers assigned for them
though.

http://books.google.com/books/about/Getting_Started_with_LibreOffice_4_0.html?id=H3ennAEACAAJ

I will let everyone know when I am finished publishing all of them and they
actually show up in the content search.

Tim

That "other group" is us. Those are copies of the printed editions
published by Friends of OpenDocument, Inc and sold through Lulu.com.
The ISBN are the ones from the interior PDFs of the printed editions,
which is why they lack covers. They would be formatted for 6"x9" and
in black-and-white.

When I published the printed editions, I ticked a box on Lulu's site
for making them available through Google. I didn't pay enough
attention to know where they would end up. I note, however, that there
is no link to where one can actually buy the book, at least not in
Australia; when I look at that page, I see links to 4 Australian
retailers, but none of them actually have the book (which is what I
would expect). I assume that you, in the USA, see links to different
retailers.

--Jean

All,

The Writer Guide has finished processing and is now available on Google Play
Books, It is also displayed by when searching LibreOffice. I already added it to
my collection and it looks pretty good through Google's web delivery method on
my 11.6" wide screen notebook. Currently I am using a slow hot spot an
McDonalds so I only checked the first few pages.

Here is the URL if you want to check it out.
http://play.google.com/store/books/details/John_A_Smith_LibreOffice_4_0_Writer_Guide?id=CEgYAwAAQBAJ

I spoke to soon it hasn't finished completely yet The Download Full PDF version
is not being displayed in The "My Books" section yet.

It looks like it will take 24-48 hours for the rest to finish processing. They
have completed the first part and are marked for live distribution on Google
Play Books.

Tim

Jean,

I have the books set for work wide distribution but due to Google business
limitations they are currently only available for PE, US and VE sales regions.

Also I am going to contact some of the US publishers ORielly etc and ask them
to publish hard copy. Some of them do this already for other open source
projects like MySQL. I will let you know if any of them agree to publish them.

Tim