[Bf-docboard] Blender books -> official reference

[Ira Krakow]

An idea just came to me.  Please feel free to poke holes in it.   Why not
publish the wiki, with the author as The Blender Foundation?   The principle
is just like Durian or Elephant's Dream.   The title would be "The Blender
3D Wiki", by The Blender Foundation.  The benefits:

1)  The content not only exists, but has been peer reviewed, edited (by the
community), and known to be high quality and useful.

2)   The authors can be given credit for their efforts, just as was the case
with the community generated movies.  We could even give anyone who buys the
book author credit, just like the Blender based movies.

3)   It's useful.  How many of us would buy it?  I definitely would.  There
are many people who feel more comfortable with a printed book than with
always looking things up online.   We could even have a Kindle edition of
the wiki, which would give the content search capability.  It would be
published under the same GNU license that applies to Blender, or the variant
that applies to books, where the Foundation keeps the copyright and grants
publishing rights to the publisher without giving up creative control.

4)   It's in the same spirit of open source that has made Blender such a
success.  It's been proven, for example, in the Linux community, that these
types of books are profitable.  Look at:

http://oreilly.com/openbook/

Tim O'Reilly has been very successful with this model.  I even think
O'Reilly Media would be interested in publishing it.

5)   Last, but certainly not least, this would be nice revenue for The
Blender Foundation :).  It would be our way of saying thanks to everyone who
has made Blender such a wonderful program.

What do you think?



On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 12:19 PM, Mike Belanger
<mikejamesbelanger at gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
> We already have excellent online documentation, in the form of the wiki.
> It is organized very closely to the ideas that have been proposed.  Reading
> the wiki has helped me tremendously.  Between the wiki and Google, what more
> would the reference book(s) provide?
>
>
>
> There should be a distinction between what sort of topics the wiki covers,
> and what the books do.  The books should be
> value-added over the wiki.
>
> I agree with Ton et all on organizing books by common areas, ie Animation,
> Modeling, Texturing, etc.  Those
> could all have specific tutorials, step-by-steps, on creating something.
>
> I think the wiki should be a generic glossary of tools, terminology, and
> settings.  Specific tutorials in the wiki shouldn't have as much priority.
>
>
> Mike Belanger ( Mikahl )
> www.watchmike.ca
>
>
>
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>


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