Editorial Team LICENCE GLOSSARY TREE FEEDBACK
Top-level Book Outlines
English | Spanish | Czech | Italian | French | German
Portuguese | Lithuanian | Russian | Danish | Romanian | Indonesian
ABSTRACTS, PLEASE
I am receiving abstracts of topic content from authors NOW. Those authors who promised material, and others who wish to submit work, please as soon as you can.
What's needed is about half a page, describing what you will write about and suggesting any structure that you have in mind. I will build up a Web Page to publish these in the short term, until the database app is ready to start chugging them out for us.
SCHEDULE AND FUNDING
I was rather optimistic about keeping to my original schedule to start posting topics for review by Easter. It was based on the original (aborted) plan for this book to be produced under the auspices of a commercial company with staff to handle administration. Dealing with the requirements for translations has consumed an unexpectedly large amount of my time. Along with this, there is still no sponsorship for writing the book so, of course, much of my personal time continues to be devoted to work which pays the rent.
I want to keep as close as possible to the original publication deadline of March/April 2000. I continue to explore ways to achieve that, through sponsorship, investment, a commissioning arrangement with a publisher or a combination of all three...some means to enable me to generate publication-ready output at a rate averaging 2000 - 3000 words per day, every day, for the next nine months.
The Glossary is now with the Translation teams for the important task of standardizing terminology.
The translators have done an outstanding job on the initial book outline. You will observe we now have the outline in 12 languages. The groups are all in contact via their individual language groups as well as through our main pipeline, our English-language IBDH-Translators list.
Thanks for all the feedback that has been coming through for the past three months. Be assured that most of the new topics have been incorporated into the lower-level outlines.
When about the book, please help the filtering by making the word "IB-BOOK" the first word in the Subject. Also, please save my time by writing in English - thanks!
FORMAT FOR PUBLICATION
It appears there is some confusion about the publication of the IBDH. Please refer to the notes under 'Publication', below. I emphasise, the primary objective is to have it published as a printed book which can be bought from bookstores. It will be one book of approximately 600,000 words. This is the maximum size possible to produce the IBDH in one paperback volume. It will be 5.5cm (2 1/4") thick at the spine with a page size of 23 cm X 19 cm (9" X 7 1/2").
DOCBOOK MODEL and XML
I'm loading everything into a database developed from the DocBook model for the document tree, providing a framework into which we will be able to push the XML text of our content. The database will serve both version control and output.
As soon as I'm able to generate a detailed outline, it will go out to my colleagues on the Editorial team and we can move into the next phase of planning.
OPEN DOCUMENT LICENCE
Well, I didn't find an Open Document licence that a) fitted what we are doing and b) was available for use. So I drafted one.
No doubt it will benefit from input from you folk out there. Please read through it and comment. I'd appreciate your taking this discussion to the IBDI list so that we can all share it. If you haven't already joined, and just fire off the resulting email.
PUBLICATION
The objective is to produce a hard-copy book. However, the entire content of the book will be published on-line, chapter by chapter, topic by topic, as drafts become available. There are two important reasons for this:
- I want to ensure that everyone gets the chance to contribute and make our content as good as it can be. I cannot think of a better way to generate a book that everyone will want to buy!
- I want non-English versions to be available at the earliest possible time. How better, than to make the edited English versions available in small chunks, throughout the writing and editing cycle, to translators who are also technically expert?
NON-ENGLISH VERSIONS
The translators list is still growing and the response continues to be great. I'm still looking for proof-readers for the translated material. Proof-readers don't need to be as fluent in English as the translators. We are looking for people who are very articulate in their native language, to feed in their ideas about style and terminology to the translator groups. We have another round of translating coming up, so we'll be .
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