Elijah Meeks and I are working on writing "Drupal for Humanists", with the goal of producing something that's relevant and readable for people ranging from undergrads and DH newbies to tech-savvy folks in DH, the library, and university IT. We were thinking of going the traditional find-a-publisher route, but there's some significant downsides, including:
- Turning all rights over to the publisher
- The near-impossibility of finding a publisher who'd be okay with Creative Commons licensing
- The fact that some of the details of the content will go out of date quickly, and we won't be able to just update it freely
We're thinking about just publishing it for free as a web-based version that we can expand and update at will, while offering a self-published print copy from a print-on-demand publisher for people who want to learn from "a book". We could also make the print version available on Amazon. I like this plan on a number of levels, from convenience to ideology, but I'm wondering if it might fall short of achieving our goal of making something that lots of people actually use.
So:
- How do you (and people you know) go about finding technical "books"? Do brick-and-mortar bookstores play much of a role? (We almost certainly wouldn't be able to get into those.)
- Be honest, would you judge a self-published technical book to be less trustworthy or authoritative than one published by a well-known publisher?
- Are there "publishers" (loosely defined) or other publication-related organizations (like the Institute for the Future of the Book) that might be worth talking to about the possibility of making the work available under their umbrella, to help provide some of the credibility that traditional publication would provide?
- Anything else we should be thinking about?
