blog.booki.cc

I’m reading a really fantastic book at the moment about the history of paper “Paper before print” by Jonathon M Bloom. Really worth checking out…it has a wonderful introduction to the history of paper which opened my eyes to the importance of paper in the history of transmitting ideas. Books are afterall just a clever way to keep as much paper together in one place to communicate an idea bigger than one sheet. Which is why we can talk meaningfully about a 2 page book – sometimes 2 pages is enough.

Now books are looking for a new form since the paper is, for the first time since the death of parchment, no longer necessary. Paper it seems, will return to its first role – packaging. A strangely circular media history.

Anyways,  there was one very nice piece in “Paper before print” that caught my attention. It caught my imagination because of a tangent – I had been thinking of how to write a book about Book Sprints and so I have been thinking about the important ingredients of Book Sprints. The piece reads:

"...the Greeks[...]began representing all their language sounds, not only the
 consonants and long vowels[...]This made the crucial gain in legibility and
 accuracy in the transcription of sounds."

In otherwords, the Greeks started representing their spoken language in text so each spoken sound had a textual equivalent. Text became a way of transcribing sound.

I like this very much because it means in a way, that books are noisy objects. We have come to think of books as quiet items – they are written in solitude and read in solitude. There are other ways of looking at this – Bob Stein talks of reading and writing as being inherently social processes (http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/11/what_ive_learned_since_posting.html) and I have heard him speak of books being places ‘where readers and writers meet’ (http://toccon.blip.tv/file/1781125/). In this sense they are noisy objects too since books trigger discussion in society – their effect is in discourse and that’s inherently noisy.

However…I was really thinking of noise in Book Sprints. I always say to a new sprint group ‘sprints are noisy environments’. They very much are – you cannot write a book quickly or well with other people if you do not talk to them. The conversation then continues through the text and back to the table. It goes around and around in a circular speech-to-text-to-speech process. Book Sprints are noise that is not just ‘transcribed’ into text but it is itself a discussion.

Anyways, I got there via tangents but I very much like the ideas of books representing noise – Book Sprints are, for me, another way to think about noisy books.

I just finished facilitating a Book Sprint about circumvention called “How to Bypass Internet Censorship”. We spent 5 days outside of Berlin updating the book we first created in a sprint in 2008. It was a ‘re-sprint’ if you like and was extremely successful.

New Update - http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/how-to-bypass-internet-censorship/15054026

Right now you can buy this book from lulu.com and you can also contribute to it through the FLOSS manuals installation of booki – http://booki.flossmanuals.net/bypassing-censorship/edit

It will also be available shortly on the FLOSS Manuals website – I just need to finish the integration with booki.

The first version of this book was extremely successful – being translated into Burmese, simplified Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, Spanish, French, Farsi, and Spanish. Most of these were also distributed in book form :

English, Russian, Arabic, Spanish versions

The book formatted PDF for the above books, includingthose with bi-directional text (Farsi, Arabic etc) were all generated using Booki.

The new book is *much* better with beautiful illustrations and cover provided by Laleh Torabi (http://www.spookymountains.com) and many new chapters, updates of old chapters and some new sections. Buy it now or wait a few days for the free version…

If you need to monitor the growth of a book in Booki you can see the entire book on one page by adding ‘/_full’ to the end of the URL of the book. For example you can look at his book in ‘read only mode’ :

http://www.booki.cc/betahaus-ein-coworking-handbuch/

and compare it to this :

http://www.booki.cc/betahaus-ein-coworking-handbuch/_full/

betahaus (http://www.betahaus.de) is a co-working space first established in Berlin and now also existing in Hamburg and soon a few other cities in Germany (and perhaps the world). Today a group of the founders and active participants met in Berlin to begin writing a book on setting up a co-working space with a special emphasis on how betahaus does it. The book is being written in German but translations will soon follow.

The Book Sprint group spent 3 hours (facilitated by me – Adam Hyde) creating the outline for the book in Booki (http://www.booki.cc/betahaus-ein-coworking-handbuch/) and they are now writing the book over the next 3 days. The first steps in the process was to first write all the ideas on what the book should be on sticky notes, group them on a wall, organise them, and then create a table of contents in Booki that reflected that structure.

All content is created under the open content license CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/).

A few days ago I facilitated the Google Summer of Code Book Sprint. We had already written one book last year in a 2 day sprint so this year we updated that book and added a second. ‘Flip bits not burgers’ (the student guide) was written in just two days by a great team of experienced GSoC mentors. After writing the book in Booki we output the text to the US 1/2 letter format (8.5 inches x 5.5 inches) which is the closest to the European A5. The book formatted PDF produced by Objavi (the Booki publishing engine) looked fantastic so we printed the interior and I designed a cover in Inkscape (http://inkscape.org/) and printed the color covers. We then cut all the content and had a binding party!

Google Summer of Code book binding party!

To bind we used the Fastback 9 and the results looked fantastic. It was really good to write the book and then print and bind the book ourselves immediately after.

Mentor & Org Admin Guide (right) and Students Guide.

The interior looked pretty cool too.

Interior produced by Objavi in about 2 minutes.

My role as ‘an educator’ revolves around group processes – namely, Book Sprints. Essentially I facilitate groups of 5-10 people working together in one room over an intensive 3-5 days to produce a book. Zero to book in 5 days (or less). This process is known as a Book Sprint and although it is an uncommon practice most people who ask for and participate in a sprint see it as a Book Production methodology. However I would argue that in all circumstances the collaborators walk away having learned a great deal about the subject they have just created a book about.

I also believe that this process can be used by students to write their own textbooks. Learning what they write and passing the free textbook onto the next years students to improve. I am eagerly awaiting the first enlightened institution that would take this on and I am sure they would be positively surprised by the results – both in the quality of book produced and by what the students learn in terms of content and collaboration.

Book Sprints utilise collaborative environments. The only Book Sprint (1) I know of before we did them (2) used word processing documents – passing these around via email between collaborators – and a wiki for collecting the articles. Part way through the process they gathered in person to develop the outline in a one week intensive ‘Outline Sprint’ and then proceeded to collaborate via email and a wiki over a period of 4-6 months. After the material was complete the group passed the documents through several editing stages. The process cut the standard industry timeline down by about 30-50%. Zero to book in 4-6 months is still pretty good in the publishing industry.

However for FLOSS Manuals 4-6 months was too long. We wanted to do it in 5 days and so we needed a quicker methodology and a better tool set. Wikis might come to your mind immediately as it did to us. However we had already realised that wikis were not built with the right paradigm. Books are very structured and wikis are not. That is the essence of it – I don’t want to get into ‘future of the book’ discussions. Books can be many things, so I am talking here of what ‘most’ people mean by a book. A one piece cover, several hundred pages, table of contents, structured readable and comprehensive content, self contained with very few references to other parts of the document and careful use of outside references instead of a welter of back-and-forth hyperlinks. We built a system that could produce this kind of book – paper books – in a Book Sprint environment. Zero to book in 5 days – that leaves about 3 minutes at the end to produce book formatted PDF ready to upload to a PoD service or send to the local printer. That is what we needed and wikis don’t enable you to do that. So we hand rolled our own. The first generation was built on T-Wiki and we pushed it to its outer limits with extensions built by Aleksandar Erkalovic and a PDF renderer built by Luka Frelih. Now we are onto the second generation – Booki (a BOOK-wikI if you will). It does the same job as the first tool set, but does it better – its easier to use, more flexible, and it supports a greater number of possible output formats and types.

While Booki does a lot and its hard to imagine a Book Sprint without it, there are limits to working digitally in a Book Sprint. Certainly we also experience the highs of surprising networked collaboration. One sprint (‘Introduction to the Command Line’) was written almost entirely remotely and written in 2 days (Mako Hill, FSF Board member and renown hacker said it was the best book on its topic). However there are also limits to digital media and digital networks. I believe that there is less knowledge passed through digital media communication channels when collaborating. I firmly believe this – otherwise we would have all of our Book Sprints remote – it would cut down on logistics and costs. However text based chat does not convey enough information, VOIP is terrible for more than 2 people at a time and even then I wonder at its real usefulness in intensive collaboration, and email is just too slow and the ‘unthreaded’ nature of email will soon drive you crazy in this kind of environment. Microblogging is as good as IRC in this instance – ie. barely useful. Sneaker networks are not only faster but more fluid and they enable better shared understandings, quicker.

In addition I find it is often good to push people out of the screen and into the book. Since we work fast in sprints we sometimes realise we need to clean up structural issues. This often occurs when 2 or more people are working on content that needs to fit together – and it doesn’t. Often we print out the necessary chapters, sit on the floor, and (gasp) cut-and-paste the chapters into each other until they work. Same process as a digital text editor, just with a physical tool set – the result is that it gets better results quicker.

The end result of a Book Sprint is a book. Thats a great thing to have. However there is also a mandate to take care of, and content to take care of. How do you enable this content to live? Books do not live by licenses alone – they need help. They need the original collaborators to find the avenues to keep the content alive. One strategy is to maintain this content themselves although, despite good will, this seldom continues beyond some initial edits immediately after the sprint ends. The original collaborators need to pass on the mandate to others, this is critical for the life of the book. As such I discourage the use of terms like ‘authors’ as this denotes legacies of ownership and does not encourage new contributors to take the mandate to improve the book. Instead the strategies revolve around keeping the participation threshold low (minimising social filters, using open language, making Booki simpler and simpler to use) and welcoming in new contributions. We also welcome forking books. Take a book – make it your own whichever way you feel is best.

However occasionally sprinters, caught up in the fervor of intensive production, often get worried about misappropriation or unethical use and erect barriers that do nothing to help and a lot to hurt. They ask themselves questions like ‘What if someone takes the content and makes money? What if contributors spam the book? What if someone changes the tone of the book? Could contributions ruin it?’ This is the ethical quandry put at the foot of freedom largely by the fears and protective necessities of the proprietary publishing industry, We all carry this a little bit and my response is always ‘let it go’. Let the content be free and you will be happily surprised by the results. The irony is that once sprinters are convinced of this idea they are left ‘fighting’ the default – standard attitudes towards publishing and authorship means its hard work to get people to uptake the freedoms of free content. Book Sprint collaborators (and free content developers in general) often need to put a lot of energy into reaching out to others to get them to take ownership of the material and make changes, but it can be done with the right approach. I am hoping soon we see will the integration of Book Sprints into Curriculum to create and improve textbooks as another way to explicitly pass on the mandate to change and I’m very much looking forward to seeing this strategy develop…

notes:

(1) The idea of a Book Sprint as outlined in the article by Marco Zenaro et al was the brain child of Tomas Krag

(2) Marco Zennaro, Enrique Canessa, Carlo Fonda, Martin Belcher, Rob Flickenger, “Book Sprint” in The International Journal of the Book (Melbourne, Australia, Common Ground Publishing, 2006) Vol 2 Number 4.

written by Adam Hyde, founder of FLOSS Manuals.

If there is one thing that Booki is known for, it is the Book Sprint.  This is what happens when a group of talented and highly motivated people are brought together to create or revise a book in just one week.  A woman who used to sit in the next office over from me at work participated in one of these.  She had become something of an expert on customizing CiviCRM, software used to do contact management for non-profits.  She had installed the software for her own Synagogue and had developed modifications to handle the Hebrew calendar, among other things.  This work had come to the attention of the developers of CiviCRM and she was invited to Lake Tahoe for a week to work on updating the manual.  The developers had gotten a grant to do this work so her travel expenses were paid and she was put up at someone’s home for the week.  It was a good experience for her.

I, too have worked on books using Booki, three of them in fact, but my own experiences are much different than a Book Sprint.  Since my second book is on creating, finding, publishing, and using e-books I had occasion to describe Booki in that book as a possible tool for creating e-books.  In that chapter I said my books were created as more of a Slog than a Sprint.  Adam Hyde (Booki project manager), read that chapter and asked me to write a post about “Book Slogs”.  Of perhaps I should say “Book Slogs(R)”.

If “Book Slog” is going to catch on as terminology we’ll need to define it.  Basically a “Book Slog” is everything that a “Book Sprint” is not.  For example:

• The book will, of necessity, take more than a week to write.  More than likely it will take months, and will involve much research.  The main author will end up knowing much more after finishing the book than he did when he began it.
• The book will have one main author, who will do most of the actual writing.
• The book may or may not have other contributors.
• The contributions of others may be informal.
• Other contributors will not be as highly motivated as the main author, or may have their own motivations that are not the same as the main author.
• The contributors will likely never meet face to face.

In other words, a Book Slog is pretty much the normal way of writing a book.  One could imagine Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Mike Huckabee getting together to write an American History textbook in a week long Book Sprint.  I wish I could stop imagining it.  I would guess, though, that in the world of free textbooks there will be more Slogs than Sprints.

The question is, does Booki have anything to offer the Slogger?  Based on my own experiences, I would have to say it does.

The interesting think about Booki is that anyone who wishes to can look over your shoulder as you work.  This may not sound like an advantage, but it can be.  I had an interesting experience on my second book, “E-Book Enlightenment”.  After writing a few chapters I had them published on the FLOSS Manuals website.  Shortly afterwards I received an email from someone at OLPC France.  They were working on their own e-book project for children in Madagascar, and they were using my still unfinished book as a reference on how to create e-books in various formats.  They were having some difficulties creating the DjVu format which I was able to help them with.

If you actually ask for feedback Booki is even better.  You don’t need to have a finished book to do it, either, just enough chapters to convince people that there will be a finished book at some point.  If you have that you can convince people that you aren’t wasting their time, and if they know that and possibly that you won’t be making any money on the book you’ll be surprised at how helpful people can be.

My first book was about writing computer programs for the One Laptop Per Child project.  I knew a bit about the subject before I began the book, but the subject really demanded that I learn more.  I got a great deal of help on setting up test environments, writing programs that can be used by multiple users, recommending development tools, etc. because people could see my book in progress any time they wished to.  My second book on e-books needed research on copyrights, building a book scanner, converting page images to text, and many other topics, and I got lots of help there too.

You can have actual co-authors and still have a Slog.  With my second book I actually looked for co-authors.  The Rural Design Collective in Oregon has done work in the past for the Internet Archive, one of the best sources for free e-books.   I approached one of them that I had worked with in the past on an OLPC project and asked if she’d like to contribute.

The RDC has a summer mentoring program that awards scholarships to talented students who are interested in careers in website design, etc.  The students work on a project for the summer.  The RDC decided that working on my second book would be their summer project.

This seemed like it was too good to be true, and in some ways it was.  People would be paid to work on my book, and it wouldn’t cost me anything.  That much was true.  We discussed ideas of what kind of contribution these students could provide, and we had lots of ideas.  I wanted Macintosh screenshots for my book and they had a Mac.  I was hoping that the students would try out my instructions and give feedback.  We thought maybe some students could try and build a book scanner and report on the experience.

The goal of the RDC was to give the students a learning experience; helping my book was of necessity a secondary goal to that.  In the end, it came down to the interests of the students.  There ended up being two mentees, one a talented artist who ended up doing original art for the book and the other who did work on style sheets for the bound and printed version.   Both of these things had been afterthoughts in the first book.  The cover image had just been a screen grab of some icons, and I used the default style sheet for creating the PDF to send to Lulu.  However, my review copy of the first book convinced me of the importance of good style sheets and cover art, and for the final bound and printed version we’ll be reworking both.  The art for the second book turned out quite well.  You can check it out here:

E-Book Enlightenment: Reading And Leading With One Laptop Per Child

The RDC itself also provided content for the book, which was a description of software they had created for publishing e-books, and they may provide more content in the future.  The summer project will be over soon, but they may do another one in the fall.

There is a quote of Antoine de Saint-Exuprey that I heard in a keynote speech recently that applies to collaboration:

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

This fits in well with my experience making these books.  You can try to drum up people and talk about what tasks need to be done, but in the end the best thing you can do is to try and make them want the book to exist as much as you do.  If you can do that collaboration may follow.

My third book is actually a translation of my first book into Spanish.  This was needed because some of the most successful work One Laptop Per Child has done has been in South America.  Technically, there was no need for me to be involved in this at all.  Anyone who wishes to may translate any FLOSS Manual without the blessing or active participation of the author.  I pointed this out on the mailing list where the suggestion for a Spanish translation had come up, and briefly described what it would take to get the translation set up.  Several people offered to work on the translation but days went by and nobody had started one.  I would guess the reason would be that whoever starts a book owns it in some sense and could be blamed for it failing.  I decided to step up and start the translation myself.

The problem with me being in charge of this translation is that I don’t speak Spanish.  I had taken French for several years with no lasting effect, but no Spanish.

Anyway, the project got set up on the translation server and I checked it over.  It turns out that the translation version of Booki lets you see the original text on the left side of the page while you enter your translation on the right.  I informed the mailing list that the project was set up, gave them the URL, and described what they’d have to do.  I set up the project so I would get emails whenever anyone updated the book.  One woman translated a few paragraphs, then days went by and nothing more happened.

A friend from work suggested using Google Translate to create a first version of the book which native speakers could correct.  I decided that this wasn’t such a bad idea, but I ended up using Babel Fish because you can copy and paste from Babel Fish and get reasonable HTML but Google Translate puts in a lot of stuff I didn’t want, like JavaScript and the original English text.  After I did this I went back and replaced code samples (which by their nature should NOT be translated) with the originals.  I then announced to the mailing list that I had done this and that the text was ready to correct.

This actually helped.  It is probably less scary to correct a bad translation than to be responsible for making a good one.  A retired teacher who is fluent in Spanish started making corrections and she contacted native speakers that she knew and sent emails to mailing lists and others started doing work on it too.  Progress has been slow but steady.  Every few days I get an email telling me that someone has made more corrections and what chapter has been corrected.  It is surprising just how many people have been willing to get an account and post corrections.  The retired teacher seems to be doing most of the work, and I suggested that she add her bio to the “About The Authors” chapter.

Writing books is hard work, and while I can’t say that Booki makes it any easier, it does improve the experience and give you ways to interact with collaborators and your target audience that can improve the final product.  If the book you want to write looks like more of a Slog than a Sprint, give it a try!

James Simmons

A Book Sprint is a methodology which enables the rapid (and collaborative) development of books in 2-5 days. The term was coined by Tomas Krag and the methodology refined and developed by FLOSS Manuals (the developers of Booki), mostly by me through my role as facilitator for most of the FM Book Sprints.

The process mostly goes like this – 5-10 people work together in real space with a Book Sprint facilitator, a Table of Contents is worked out in the first few hours of the first day and then the book is written, edited, revised over the following 2-5 days. The atmosphere is a very permissive writing environment where permission is not required before editing someone elses work and all ‘authorial egos’ are left outside the door of the Sprint room. Conversation is stimulated and encouraged by the facilitator and all in all everyone ends up having a good time and producing a book – in electronic and paper form.

Collaborative Futures Book Sprint, January 2010

Book Sprints are a wonderful new way to create content and Booki is designed to support this kind of activity as well as the more traditional ‘Book Slog’ (see the forthcoming post by James Simmons about this method).

FLOSS Manuals developed the methodology writing books about free software however now we are experimenting with Book Sprints on all kinds of content and so far it is working very well indeed!

Something a little different will be happening during this year’s Toronto Open Source Week: a two-day book sprint for the Thunderbird FLOSS Manual. This sprint will take place Toronto, Canada (and online) on Tuesday 26 October and Wednesday 27 October.

In January of this year the Booki team gathered a small group of people together in Berlin to embark on the first ever Book Sprint using Booki. A Book Sprint is a rapid development method we have developed to write books in 2-5 days(!). This method was pioneered with FLOSS Manuals and we were keen to then apply this to other types of content and try out our new platform (Booki at that stage had not even been released in any form) which was built to support this kind of rapid collaboration.

The result was a fantastic book – Collaborative Futures – which is available in print and the book was recently re-sprinted at Eyebeam, New York. This fork will be available soon in print.

Booki performed exceptionally well for this first trial. Of course the platform has progressed a lot since then! In particular we have added new History functionality and if you would like to see how this works then look at the Collaborative Futures History tab in Edit mode. Its pretty impressive.

Mike Linksvlayer (VP at Creative Commons and a participant in the sprint) blogged about the event and Bennett Williamson made a video.