We are nearly done, I hope. One can keep on tweaking
parameters endlessly, so at regular intervals we grab our
chief graphics designer and tell him :
decision time! which of the two is best? At the moment, we decided on
our own chapter-style \chapterstyle{neb} which is an
adaptation of the demo-style in
memoir.cls (see on the left). We also have our own page-style which
is an adaptation of the companion-style (the house-style of the
LaTeX Companion series).
You will notice that the page-format is a bit odd. As mentioned before, we didn’t want to copy the regular mathematics-book -look. We went for a fun format (square, 7.5 by 7.5 inch ; think of an inflated CD-box) as well as a handy one (so we will go for spiral-bound books). The reason for this is that we noticed that the most consulted copy of version 2 around at the department is Stijn’s which has a nice coil binding so you can always lay it nicely flat on a desk, whether you just want to look something up, or use it to explain something at the blackboard.
Perhaps you can
even see that the font is slightly smaller than the regular
10pt. Memoir allows for a 9pt font and this looks so
much better. Besides, it helps to keep the number of pages
reasonable, and related to this : keep the production costs low. At the
moment the plan is to be able to sell a book of say 260 pages under 13
Euros (that is, 5 EuroCent/page), but more on this next week.
What else? Well, recently, we decided on the
copyright-license (at least for the first book). Clearly, all
neverending-books will have their own ISBN-number
and the copyright is one of the
Creative Common
Licenses. At first we thought of taking the same one that protects
(however, see
mewt’s story
) this site and which is, in technical terms, a by-nc-nd:be
license. But, in the end, we decided to go for a Developing Nations
License. Here\’s why :
The Developing Nations license allows, for the first time, any copyright holder in the world to participate first-hand in reforming global information policy. The fact is that most of the world’s population is simply priced out of developed nations’ publishing output. To authors, that means an untapped readership. To economists, it means “deadweight loss.” To human rights advocates and educators, it is a tragedy. The Developing Nations license is designed to address all three concerns.
So, what else needs to be done by next week when we hope to launch our first book? Well, I need to write some blurb and we have to decide on front- and back-covers. Tomorrow, I hope to report on how that one ended.
latex, mac
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Posted in general
Written on Tue, 28 June 2005 at 8:46 am
Tags: latex, mac
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