I’m Jo Stichbury, head of Technical Communications at Symbian. My colleague Satu blogged last month about our first Symbian eBook, Demand Paging on Symbian, which can be downloaded as a free pdf from the Symbian developer website. Here’s a brief update to share some more exciting news about Symbian books.
Creative Commons Licensing
If you downloaded the pdf, you may have noticed that we’ve decided to release the book under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license. As the creative commons website explains “This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.”
At Symbian, we’re happy for anyone to take the text of the book and re-use it in any way they choose (for example, as part of a training course, or within another book about Symbian) as long as we are attributed as the originators, and anything you release is licensed similarly.
Creative Commons BY-SA license
(Wikipedia recently approved the use of this license for most of the content on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites).
Books On Demand
The other announcement about the book should please those that like reading physical book copies rather than pdfs on their computer or a handheld reader. In partnership with Newsstand UK, we are now able to make copies of the book available to purchase from Amazon. These books are reasonably priced at £11.50, and are shipped within 3 days. The exciting part of the arrangement, from my point of view, is that they are printed on demand using an Espresso Book Machine (or EBM). If you’ve not seen or heard of these yet, think of them as a vending machine for books. The electronic copy of the book is stored in a database and, when a printed copy is needed, the operator fires up the machine, which spits out the book in under 10 minutes. It’s different to the traditional publishing model, whereby a number of copies are run off and stored in a warehouse, and has the advantage of minimising waste and storage costs.
How do I get a copy of Demand Paging on Symbian?
At present, if you purchase a copy of our book at Amazon, it is printed using an EBM in London, and sent out by mail. On Demand Books, the makers of the EBM, have created a catalogue of nearly 2 million books (in-copyright and public domain manuscripts) that you can request to be printed for you. We’re in the process of adding our book to the catalogue, and when it’s in the system, you will also be able to go to any EBM location to print the book (or use the Internet to order it from those locations that support it).
I am rather excited by the EBM, since it’s becoming increasingly popular, and offers a cheap way for us to make printed copies of our books available to whoever wants them, whenever they want them. Who knows, in future maybe every coffee shop, airport, train station and bookshop will have one!
Advantages of on-demand publishing
Having worked in book publishing with Symbian for a few years now, I’ve seen our technology move so fast that our books date quickly. In the past we’ve recognised this and published articles on our website to update the books, or used a wiki to make minor changes, for example, when a URL in the book needs updating.
We now have the opportunity to update book manuscripts directly. We’ll simply make the changes, re-release the free pdf, and also re-submit it to the EBM catalog. There’s no waiting around for the publisher to sell the existing printed copies sat in their warehouse. We can turn around a new version of a book as fast as we want and as often as we need.
One question that always comes up with the EBM is what kind of quality are the copies? Are they as good as from a traditional print run? I think so! The quality of the paper, binding and cover are respectable for the price, and the main look and feel of a book comes from the typeset. For our book, Satu used Adobe’s InDesign, which is the same tool that the pros use.
If you have questions about the EBM, you can find a set of FAQs published by On Demand Books, you can contact me directly (jos AT symbian.org) or post them as comments.
Receive an Author-Signed Copy of Demand Paging on Symbian
We’re offering one of our readers the opportunity to win an author-signed copy of the book to see for themselves. Before August 14th, please leave a comment to this post with your suggestions for further books you’d like to see Symbian publish on an EBM. We’ll select a winner and contact you to arrange shipment of the book.
Finally, here’s a short video we made of the Demand Paging book being printed in London last month. Thanks to my colleague Andrew Longworth for filming and editing it.
Symbian is going to open source, and everyone will have access to the kernel side code, which was unseen for many of us. I think that the Symbian OS internals would be very interesting book when Symbian kernel code is available for all.
I would also be very interested of a book about symmetric multiprocessing in Symbian OS. The SMP support should be in the kernel about at the same time, when the swing to the open source is done, right?
It’s just a printer that can print PDFs!
Na seriously, its a big step from the gutenburg press.
I like the idea of just in time publishing. Where possible I try to keep things digital, but learning a programming environment has the almost paradoxical quality of being much more pleasant to do if you have a book on your lap (rather than keep switching windows). It’s ironic that huge sections of waterstones are filled with computer books about SQL, intenet and office….all things heralded as part of the paperless office revolution.
So I think the recipes would work well in this way – sitting on your lap.
Print On Demand services have been around for a few years, but what’s interesting about this one is that the press is decentralised. So if there is one of these machines in your country, you can avoid expensive international shipping charges (often shipping from USA->europe cost more than the book itself)
It’s not just the involvement of print-on-demand that’s interesting (yes, it’s been around for years) it’s the coupling of this with a Creative Commons licence (and downloadable PDF) to mean that when you purchase a printed book you’re paying for the format not the content. The content is free.
although the issues around copyfraud are interesting
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/26/copyfraud/page2.html
I think that “Symbian OS Explained” by Jo Stichbury is an excellent book because it is referenced quite often. But the new version is coming on Amazon soon so I think it should be offerred this way.
Definately COOL!
Now … who is daring enough to write a complete source book on their S60/Symbian device. Moreover, is there any idea/plan to create such an application that can upload to the Expresso database and be reviewed for original author content then be published to the print database?
This is definately forward thinking … I just hope the repair and maintenance costs are not too high from traditional printers.
Thanks for your comments!
It’s true that print on demand has been around for a few years. As I understand it, the Espresso Book Machine itself has been through several iterations, and this is the first that can reliably offer good quality copies at low cost. The breakthrough is that, besides the technology improvements, it also now offers a large database of copyright works as well as non-copyright titles and self-published works. Previously, print on demand for individuals was somewhat niche, but now consumers can get in-print books anywhere the EBM is placed.
For Symbian, it’s exciting because we can combine EBM with Creative Commons, as Freddie says, to offer free content in a range of formats. Previously, our published works have been tied up by copyright (unfortunately Symbian OS Explained falls into that category, so we won’t be able to put it out under BY-SA license just yet).
Additionally as John Atkins explains in the video, anyone can get involved and publish books on Symbian based on what we’re publishing under Creative Commons license, or on a completely new topic. This could include translations, course manuals or mashups (and whilst I acknowledge the potential for copy-fraud that Stringer points out, I don’t believe we should limit our community because of it).
I like the idea of upgrading books. Jasper Fforde, an english novelist, made it real @ http://www.jasperfforde.com/upgradegc.html. He also solved the problem of the hard copy not being updated, but to know how, you’ll have to read the Thursday Next serie.
Brilliant! Thanks Philippe. I particularly like the idea of stickers you can print out and apply (http://www.jasperfforde.com/images/tfb2.1.gif)
)
[...] previous post about on-demand publishing in July gave some hints about why we think wiki books are so cool. With help from contributors [...]