The final details for my book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation, are coming together. Lots of news to report, so here goes.
I’m so excited to announce that Eliot Kimber has agreed to use my book for the DITA for Publishers project, taking the content from Adobe InDesign to DITA.
Tom Johnson also posted a fun interview he recorded during the STC Summit. I told Tom, I can hear myself grinning. This book is just fun to talk about.
I’m often asked, how long have you been working on it? I answer that I’ve been working on it for over a year now. It combines lots of stories from my corporate blogging days at BMC Software with my foray into the open source community with the One Laptop per Child project, SugarLabs (the education project that runs the open source software on the OLPC laptop), and most importantly, FLOSS Manuals, providing free software for free documentation. My thirty-hour work week at ASI has afforded me the time to write out my journey and my observations along the way.
What a journey it has been and I’m so pleased with how the book is turning out. This week I am furiously indexing (is there any other way to index besides furiously?) and often messing with recto and verso pages, something I haven’t done in InDesign before and boy does it show. My PageMaker days as a graduate assistant at Miami University’s Center for Chemical Education are coming in handy, no doubt about it.
I think we’ve finalized the cover design, which for me is a very exciting part of real bookmaking! I’ll see if I can share it on my blog soon.
Four fine people have agreed to do technical reviews and I know some of them are at least 100 pages in. I hope they have insights – but not too many that may cause me to think too hard. Just kidding, Alan, Will, Sarah, and Scott! 🙂 Keep reading and keep your notes at the ready because I’m ready to make all the changes needed to keep this project rolling. This book’s time has come.