After the initial crowd-funding campaign, we set April as a target date for the release of the book. April is almost over so it’s time for us to give you some news.
First, we’re very happy to announce that the liberation fund has been completed and thus the book will be released under free licenses (GPL2+ + CC-BY-SA 3.0) from the start.
The liberation campaign was slowly loosing momentum in the last months but we had the chance to have two significant donations from BackTrack Linux first (1000 EUR) and then from École Ouverte Francophone (1442 EUR) which completed the fund. Thank you to them and to all the individuals who contributed in the last few months (387 persons!).
If you haven’t seen it yet on our Google+ page or on Raphaël’s blog, have a look at the nice cover for the book:
While the book cover has been ready for a few weeks, the book itself is not yet ready. We still have a last batch of reviews to process and we’re not done yet with the LaTeX stylesheet used to render the PDF for the printed book (we’re using dblatex for this).
If nothing unexpected happens, you can expect the book release in the next 2-3 weeks. This time we must make it, because I (Raphaël) have planned a one-week vacation after! 🙂
Do you plan to release also MOBI version (for e-readers like kindle) ?
Most likely, yes. But they will be converted into MOBI from the EPUB version.
Do to have any plan on calling for translation? I am quite interested in translating it in Italian.
Definitely. It would be nice to have it available in other languages as well. I already have various offers of translations and I plan to recontact the various persons once the book is released. I have noted your name. Thank you for the offer!
So, please, add my name for brazilian translation. 🙂 I already did other work about Debian, the Debian Infographic, and i can help to translate for pt-BR.
congratulation by your work!
Hey Claudio, we find ourselves on the same side, again, it seems 🙂
I am planning a translation as well, I’ll make an official announce when ready for work.
Count me in for the brazilian translation. I’d love to help!
Congratulations Raphael.
I’m really happy to see you finally did it. It took time but the time is coming.
How much is it going to cost? Is it going to be available in PDF or any other electronic method?
Congratz again.
Thank you Guillermo. Of course it will be available in PDF, HTML and EPUB for free. For the printed book, I don’t know yet the price but it will be between 40 and 50 EUR I guess. We’re close to 550 pages in the format that we picked and with the current book layout.
A dedicated translation page/wiki would be nice.
I’m always available to help with the Dutch (nl-be) translation.
For free?
You are really a good Linux supporter.
Guillermo, you will have the option to pay/donate, don’t worry. But yes since the liberation fund has been completed, the book will be available for free.
Congratulations on the success of the liberation fund!
Congratulations!
Since it’s going to be available as PDF and epub, do you plan to allow access to book’s sources (LaTeX files or another format) for review/corrections?
The sources are in docbook, and yes, of course. That’s a given since we plan to upload the book to Debian as a package.
Are you considering opening access to source files for community feedback before starting the printing process?
No, but since we use a “print-on-demand” service. It would be relatively easy to update it if needed.
The 8th of may is my birthday, could I wish for a special present at that date?
Anyway thank you for your job, I’m really looking forward for your book!
Congratulation that you reach the goal. I thnik this can serve as a role model for fundraising free as in freedom content. I think that users of free content must steep up and be willing to actually finance the creation of free as in freedom content =)
Congradulations!
I am a blind LInux user. I have actually used Ubuntu for basically the past five years exclusively. A book of this nature is exactly what I have been looking for. Because of my very low income (I receive disability benefits here in the U.S.), I couldn’t donate toward the liberation although I wanted to. When I have some extra money after expenditures I definitely want to make a donation, although it will not be much.
Keep up the great work. I will spread the word about this book. I am really excited about it! Thank you so much for doing this!
I dream about the translation to Ukrainian or Russian 🙂
Is it possible to get a copy of the stylesheet? I love the design and want to use it for my thesis.
^^I’m talking about the LaTeX stylesheet…
See dblatex/librement.sty in the sources. But it’s meant to be used with dblatex and might need work to be used standalone.
Any success in converting it to a standalone latex style to be used in normal latex docs?