Greetings. On 2014 Aug 14, at 01:10, Worik Stanton <worik.stan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Suggestion: Package the release notes, FAQ and some other documentation > into a PDF and sell that at the same price as the CD, from the same > place. I'd buy that. It would be better quality than the (often) crap > O'Reilly sell, and I buy that. This is potentially quite a good idea. The T-shirts and CDs exist because (a) some people find them useful in themselves, and (b) some people prefer or find it more convenient to buy a physical thing they don't intend to use, as a means of making an indirect donation to the project. This of course is discussed at length in the rest of this thread. There's precedent for such a physical book being sellable. The Python Reference Manual [1] is a dead-tree version of the language and library description also available for free at [2]. There's clearly some story about the various reasons why people buy that, but it's clear that at least some do. I have considered doing so myself -- a paper document is superior to an on-screen one in some circumstances -- but in the end found it more convenient to print out selected sections of the downloaded PDF. Places like lulu.com will put a PDF on paper for you and sell/ship the result. I've no idea of the economic details of that, or alternatives to lulu, but such services do exist. I'm not making any promises here, but given mild encouragement I'd be very willing to take a look at how complicated it would be to turn the existing text or texts into a readable PDF (I've done this sort of thing before, and could probably do it fairly efficiently). However it's not obvious to me where the source of the FAQ is. The HTML is at [3] and there's a plain-text version at [4], but I presume these are generated from some other common source. The latter says that "The FAQ is available in text form in the pub/OpenBSD/doc directory from many FTP mirrors", but I wasn't able to turn that into an actual URL, or a location on <http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/>. All the best, Norman [1] http://www.amazon.com/Python-Language-Reference-Manual/dp/1906966141/ [2] https://docs.python.org/3/download.html [3] http://www.openbsd.org/faq/index.html [4] http://www.openbsd.org/faq/obsd-faq.txt -- Norman Gray : http://nxg.me.uk SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK
