On 10/02/2012 09:37 AM, Rob Weir wrote:
On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 12:01 PM, Donald Whytock <[email protected]> wrote:
Amazon can be considered a publisher. They have a mechanism for
publishing one's own ebook.
I just noticed this when I looked to see if there are any new books
from 2012 not on that page. There are a few books for the Kindle, not
available anywhere else but on Amazon, and having no neutral
identifier like an ISBN number. So in that case I'd agree that the
publisher is Amazon.
My concern was more that we don't show favoritism toward a particular
book seller for those old-fashioned paper books.
I *like* old-fashioned paper books! :/
see more...
If you're going to allow authors to make their own entries a la
consultants, they should probably be allowed to submit whatever link
they'd prefer. That might be an Amazon or B&N link, as the author
might not otherwise have his own page.
I was not going down the self-submission of book links path. I was
just thinking of what we should do to normalize the links we already
have. But the next step would be that either we maintain the list or
ask the authors to.
Different but related question: ASF would not want to certify,
recommend or otherwise vet consultants because (among other things)
they're changing entities, and may unexpectedly defraud, default or
retire. Books, on the other hand, are fairly static. Should there be
a list of AOO-vetted books, which have been reviewed and proven to be
reasonably helpful and accurate?
I'm not sure how we could do this fairly unless we received and
reviewed a copy of each book.
We could provide a comprehensive list of titles that meet some object
criteria, e.g., list "OpenOffice" in the title. This would be
fair/impartial, but would be less useful to the site visitor because
it would have a lot of junk, e.g., books auto-generated by scraping
Wikipedia content.
A bit of history on these. In the past, authors directly contacted OO.o
and asked for placement on this list -- no review by OO.o, no direct
entry by authors. You will note that a fair number of the entries are
from ODFAuthors, but there were others who were regular contributors as
well.
We have three goals/constraints, and they are somewhat conflicting:
1) Help the site visitor (typically a user of OpenOffice) to become
more proficient in the product. Ideally we'd recommend the best
titles to them.
...and, in truth, do we know what these are? What we love in terms of
explanation, someone else might hate
2) Encourage the overall ecosystem, by making users aware of the best titles
3) Be fair, impartial, and tread carefully when we touch on commercial
ventures, per our non-profit status.
What is best for 1 and 2 is worst for 3. Filtering based on quality
is the difficulty.
...yes, and maybe something we don't want to get involved in really
One way out would be to not list books at all, but to just make a
statement along the lines of: "There are many books about OpenOffice,
including eBooks and self-published books in additional to traditional
titles. Users should be able to find these easily by searching the
catalog of their favorite bookseller".
I would be in favor of this approach, don't list anything but provide
links to resources where some might be found: Lulu, Amazon, etc.
That would let the user find
quality via, say, the rating system at Amazon, peer reviews, etc. And
we could accomplish #2 by offering to interview book authors on the
project blog.
I have no strong opinion on the long-term maintenance of the book
listings. I mainly just want to get the current listing in
conformance with emerging policy in this area, and perhaps suggest
this as another topic that the policy might speak to explicitly.
When I made a few modifications yesterday to the Support page, I was
strongly tempted to just get rid of the books list. I value the
contributions these authors have made to the ecosystem, but, I honestly
don't see how we can become book reviewers in the long term. So, I am
happy you have brought raised this issue.
-Rob
Don
On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 11:42 AM, Rob Weir <[email protected]> wrote:
On our support website, at the bottom, we have a list of
OpenOffice-related books:
http://www.openoffice.org/support/
As you see, we have links to 3rd party pages for purchasing the books,
usually Amazon or Lulu.
I'm in the process of updating this page, as part of adding a list of
consultants, and it occurred to me that we should probably think about
how Shane's draft linking policy applies to books:
http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/linking
One way to think of it is to treat the publisher or author (for
self-published books) as the "consultant" in the terms of the policy.
They are the ones providing the service, via their book. So we would
allow linking to the author's website or the publisher's website which
describes the book. But we would not link to Amazon, since they are a
retailer, not the author or the publisher.
Otherwise, same criteria as consultants -- factual list, respect
trademark, impartial, rel="nofollow", etc.
Does this make sense?
-Rob
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MzK
"Just 'cause you got the monkey off your back
doesn't mean the circus has left town."
-- George Carlin
