Re: D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
On Sunday, 27 December 2015 at 14:44:37 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote: I think wannabe game programmers is a sizeable market. Programmers that dont have the capacity to learn modern C++ and would pay for a quality tutorial of how to build a commercial level game using OpenGL, OpenAL and a physics engine, with downloadable chapter by chapter source code. This may have potential. Sort of like that old "Game Programming Gems" book series, only geared for a specific language. -Wyatt
Re: D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
On Wednesday, 23 December 2015 at 12:54:39 UTC, Jakob Jenkov wrote: I really want to put these paid blogging ideas into use one day, but maybe D isn't the place to do it. Or - maybe D is exactly the right use case. D doesn't already have a ton of available material, but still as a decent size community. Yes, D could always use more material, other than the books available now. Whether it's done through my paid blogging ideas or not will depend on how many D devs decide they'd like to try writing for such a paid blog. I'd say the hardest part is to get information about those parts of D which are not documented. I find the D docs for Phobos pretty hard to read. There are very few explanations to the methods and classes. The "read the code" dogma is not very helpful to beginners in a new language or API. I recommend Andrei and Ali's books for the language itself, though they don't go much into phobos (still reading the free chapter on ranges from Mike's book and have not read most of Adam's book yet). On Wednesday, 23 December 2015 at 15:28:34 UTC, bachmeier wrote: On Wednesday, 23 December 2015 at 03:05:46 UTC, Joakim wrote: I've been thinking about contacting various D devs to see how much interest there is- I mentioned that I contacted one guy already- but I wasn't sure if I myself wanted to put time into this. I really want to put these paid blogging ideas into use one day, but maybe D isn't the place to do it. I don't think it would be worth your time to focus on D in general. If you want someone to pay more than a couple dollars a year, you need to offer something specific, and it needs to offer a direct, immediate career benefit. Web development with D might work if done right. Probably the better thing is to go into it with a low price and a goal of learning. Then you can move on to a more profitable market. I was thinking of focusing on more advanced usage of D, ie the new idioms that D makes available with its specific constructs and libraries, maybe supplemented with posts for intermediate users. I don't think there's such a book now, as they understandably focus on new or inexperienced users. I don't think D can offer a "direct, immediate career benefit," as you can't use D in most workplaces. I'm skeptical that D will ever do well in web development, as no AoT-compiled language garners much share (maybe Go has gotten a little recently). Rather, the goal would be a site for hobbyists to learn how to use the language to its fullest, without having to dive into the source and github PRs to extract all that info themselves. Obviously, learning D might indirectly benefit someone in their career, by learning new concepts from D that other languages don't employ, but that's not direct or immediate. The prices would be low- I mentioned a $5-10 paid balance- but more importantly pay as you use, ie metered. So if someone found a lot of use, it would be possible for them to spend $50 or more in a year. Someone else might just read an article or two occasionally, and only end up using $1-2 from their balance. I believe such metered models are the endgame online, crazy to me that almost nobody is doing it yet, decades after it's been possible.
Re: D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
On Sunday, 27 December 2015 at 14:44:37 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote: On Sunday, 27 December 2015 at 08:25:58 UTC, Joakim wrote: recently). Rather, the goal would be a site for hobbyists to learn how to use the language to its fullest, without having to dive into the source and github PRs to extract all that info themselves. Obviously, learning D might indirectly benefit someone in their career, by learning new concepts from D that other languages don't employ, but that's not direct or immediate. I think wannabe game programmers is a sizeable market. Programmers that dont have the capacity to learn modern C++ and would pay for a quality tutorial of how to build a commercial level game using OpenGL, OpenAL and a physics engine, with downloadable chapter by chapter source code. That's a good idea. When I heard Mike Parker was putting out a book, I was expecting it to be something like that. Maybe he'll do it on a paid blog instead. :)
Re: D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
On Sunday, 27 December 2015 at 08:25:58 UTC, Joakim wrote: recently). Rather, the goal would be a site for hobbyists to learn how to use the language to its fullest, without having to dive into the source and github PRs to extract all that info themselves. Obviously, learning D might indirectly benefit someone in their career, by learning new concepts from D that other languages don't employ, but that's not direct or immediate. I think wannabe game programmers is a sizeable market. Programmers that dont have the capacity to learn modern C++ and would pay for a quality tutorial of how to build a commercial level game using OpenGL, OpenAL and a physics engine, with downloadable chapter by chapter source code.
Re: D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
On 28/12/15 3:44 AM, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote: On Sunday, 27 December 2015 at 08:25:58 UTC, Joakim wrote: recently). Rather, the goal would be a site for hobbyists to learn how to use the language to its fullest, without having to dive into the source and github PRs to extract all that info themselves. Obviously, learning D might indirectly benefit someone in their career, by learning new concepts from D that other languages don't employ, but that's not direct or immediate. I think wannabe game programmers is a sizeable market. Programmers that dont have the capacity to learn modern C++ and would pay for a quality tutorial of how to build a commercial level game using OpenGL, OpenAL and a physics engine, with downloadable chapter by chapter source code. I want to do this myself as part of the The way to program series of books. Unfortunately I need to learn it all myself...
Re: D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
On Thursday, 24 December 2015 at 17:19:30 UTC, karabuta wrote: On Sunday, 20 December 2015 at 21:09:31 UTC, Jakob Jenkov wrote: Writing a focused book of around 100 pages can be done in 3-6 months. If more people chip in, it might even be faster. There are these books floating around where various programmers actually come together to write them. Each author take charge of a section. They go like: Problem: How to rename all files in a directory. Solution: .. They take advantage of common tasks and make them into a book. These books really sell. D community/Consortium can do similar if is worth it. Wrox Publishing uses this model. Not all their books are really good, but they can be decent. I was thinking the D Language Foundation could do the same. But I guess someone has to take the reigns, make a plan and mobilize people.
Re: D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
On Sunday, 20 December 2015 at 21:09:31 UTC, Jakob Jenkov wrote: Writing a focused book of around 100 pages can be done in 3-6 months. If more people chip in, it might even be faster. There are these books floating around where various programmers actually come together to write them. Each author take charge of a section. They go like: Problem: How to rename all files in a directory. Solution: .. They take advantage of common tasks and make them into a book. These books really sell. D community/Consortium can do similar if is worth it.
Re: D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
On Wednesday, 23 December 2015 at 03:05:46 UTC, Joakim wrote: I've been thinking about contacting various D devs to see how much interest there is- I mentioned that I contacted one guy already- but I wasn't sure if I myself wanted to put time into this. I really want to put these paid blogging ideas into use one day, but maybe D isn't the place to do it. I don't think it would be worth your time to focus on D in general. If you want someone to pay more than a couple dollars a year, you need to offer something specific, and it needs to offer a direct, immediate career benefit. Web development with D might work if done right. Probably the better thing is to go into it with a low price and a goal of learning. Then you can move on to a more profitable market.
Re: D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
I really want to put these paid blogging ideas into use one day, but maybe D isn't the place to do it. Or - maybe D is exactly the right use case. D doesn't already have a ton of available material, but still as a decent size community. I'd say the hardest part is to get information about those parts of D which are not documented. I find the D docs for Phobos pretty hard to read. There are very few explanations to the methods and classes. The "read the code" dogma is not very helpful to beginners in a new language or API.
Re: D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 12:55:19 UTC, Jakob Jenkov wrote: All decent ideas- I've been thinking recently about setting up a paid blog for articles by D devs- but without someone to explore and push them, they will go nowhere, ie somebody has to do the work of wrangling the writers and docs. What do you mean by a "paid blog" ? Simple, a blog that you pay to read. :) It's amazing to me that people still continue to pump out books, such an outdated form, simply because it has an existing payment model in place, rather than trying new paid models online. Simply churning out ebooks or the equivalent is all they do, when so much more is possible online, everything from pay-per-post to comments. The lack of imagination is simply stunning. I've been thinking about trying to get some D devs to contribute posts to such a paid blog- contacted one guy a couple weeks ago, he didn't have time- but I wasn't sure if anybody would be interested in writing posts and if I wanted to spend much time on getting it going. That's why I said the main issue is having someone push it, at least initially. After that, it of course depends on who wants to write and if anyone wants to read it.
Re: D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
Simple, a blog that you pay to read. :) It's amazing to me that people still continue to pump out books, such an outdated form, simply because it has an existing payment model in place, rather than trying new paid models online. Simply churning out ebooks or the equivalent is all they do, when so much more is possible online, everything from pay-per-post to comments. The lack of imagination is simply stunning. I agree. A website / blog allows links to videos etc. and it can be expanded over time, and indexed by search engines. Have you considered using LeanPub for this?
Re: D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 17:29:56 UTC, Bubbasaur wrote: On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 17:01:17 UTC, Joakim wrote: The problem is ads make no money for the vast majority of writers, so they have to write a book and sell it to make writing worth their time. This is why you have to pay for almost all the D books, with free online books like Ali's the rare exception to the rule. I see, but I thought the money was for the D Consortium/Organization. If there's almost no money coming in, does it matter where that pittance goes? ;) I wasn't talking about the D foundation, but a paid blog that would get writers to produce good articles online. Anyway it's really a big problem, if you see, currently sites like: vice, verge, medium etc. They all work with ads, every time you see a "click bait" title. The dirty little secret is that those sites make little to no money, relying on funding from dumb VCs before they go out of business, like the Gigaom tech blog. Vice has done well, and looking up why now, I see it's because they mostly focus on video and made deals with TV channels and cable companies, not exactly replicable for most writers. The best way to illustrate how inadequate ads are is this chart, that shows what happened to US newspaper ad revenue over the last 15 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Naa_newspaper_ad_revenue.svg That little blue squib at the bottom, that's online ads. Newspaper revenue used to be 80% from ads, now they're all putting up paid subscription banners, because ads just don't work for most sites online. I remember paying $50 ~ $80 for Programming books, but that were the old times, today with ebooks and piracy things are bad. Ebooks definitely lower costs, so they _should_ be cheaper. As for piracy, that genie is out of the bottle, all you can do is mitigate it. But paid books still sell well, and that's only because of the complete lack of imagination of people to try paid online models, such as paid blogs. On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 17:55:16 UTC, Jakob Jenkov wrote: It is all beyond idiotic: it is amazing how long antiquated ideas stick around, only because people cannot imagine anything else. I agree 100%. I published 4 books for Amazon Kindle, then stopped for exactly this reason. You can do so much more advanced stuff on the web than in an ebook. I run http://tutorials.jenkov.com which has a good bit above 1 million page views a month. I do a few videos too. I just publish as I write. I earn a bit of money from the ads, but it's not that much money. The % of people browsing with ad blockers is rising. Wow, that's pretty good traffic. I've been reading your IAP/ION spec and was surprised how clearly it's written, guess that's why. How would a paid blog work? Subscription? Texts hidden behind a pay wall? Hard to get it into the search engines then... Paywall for 80% of the posts, with the remaining free to sample, and the reader puts in $5-10 and gets charged 5-25 cents from that balance per post clicked on. That metered model is much better than subscriptions. If I don't read any posts for two months, I don't get charged any money from my balance. There are ways to get content behind a paywall indexed, paid sites like the WSJ do it.
Re: D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
On 23/12/15 5:10 AM, Joakim wrote: On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 15:33:50 UTC, Jakob Jenkov wrote: Simple, a blog that you pay to read. :) It's amazing to me that people still continue to pump out books, such an outdated form, simply because it has an existing payment model in place, rather than trying new paid models online. Simply churning out ebooks or the equivalent is all they do, when so much more is possible online, everything from pay-per-post to comments. The lack of imagination is simply stunning. I agree. A website / blog allows links to videos etc. and it can be expanded over time, and indexed by search engines. Have you considered using LeanPub for this? Never heard much about them. Looking at their site now, I like that they focus on getting chapters in front of readers right away, while they're being written (which almost every writer should be doing), but don't like their emphasis on producing books at the end. A categorized/tagged blog with comments is a much better experience than a static book with a table of contents and index, yet they import blog posts and turn them into a book! The only reason is that books have a long-standing payment model in place: it's as though everyone were still selling buggies because there are only buggy dealers and no car dealers yet. It is all beyond idiotic: it is amazing how long antiquated ideas stick around, only because people cannot imagine anything else. I've got two books through leanpub. It is ideal for a magazine or books. If you want help, please let me know! I would be happy to help for it.
Re: D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
On Wednesday, 23 December 2015 at 01:33:22 UTC, Rikki Cattermole wrote: On 23/12/15 5:10 AM, Joakim wrote: On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 15:33:50 UTC, Jakob Jenkov wrote: Have you considered using LeanPub for this? Never heard much about them. Looking at their site now, I like that they focus on getting chapters in front of readers right away, while they're being written (which almost every writer should be doing), but don't like their emphasis on producing books at the end. A categorized/tagged blog with comments is a much better experience than a static book with a table of contents and index, yet they import blog posts and turn them into a book! The only reason is that books have a long-standing payment model in place: it's as though everyone were still selling buggies because there are only buggy dealers and no car dealers yet. It is all beyond idiotic: it is amazing how long antiquated ideas stick around, only because people cannot imagine anything else. I've got two books through leanpub. It is ideal for a magazine or books. If you want help, please let me know! I would be happy to help for it. Are you offering to write for a D blog or to get it set up on leanpub? I'd never use an external platform like leanpub where I don't control the source, as one of the main points would be to add new paid blog features like the ones I've mentioned above.
Re: D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
On 23/12/15 3:26 PM, Joakim wrote: On Wednesday, 23 December 2015 at 01:33:22 UTC, Rikki Cattermole wrote: On 23/12/15 5:10 AM, Joakim wrote: On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 15:33:50 UTC, Jakob Jenkov wrote: Have you considered using LeanPub for this? Never heard much about them. Looking at their site now, I like that they focus on getting chapters in front of readers right away, while they're being written (which almost every writer should be doing), but don't like their emphasis on producing books at the end. A categorized/tagged blog with comments is a much better experience than a static book with a table of contents and index, yet they import blog posts and turn them into a book! The only reason is that books have a long-standing payment model in place: it's as though everyone were still selling buggies because there are only buggy dealers and no car dealers yet. It is all beyond idiotic: it is amazing how long antiquated ideas stick around, only because people cannot imagine anything else. I've got two books through leanpub. It is ideal for a magazine or books. If you want help, please let me know! I would be happy to help for it. Are you offering to write for a D blog or to get it set up on leanpub? I'd never use an external platform like leanpub where I don't control the source, as one of the main points would be to add new paid blog features like the ones I've mentioned above. I would be happy to help with leanpub. With regards to pretty much anything. Ok so here is the thing about leanpub. You control the manifest. You can then once published do what ever you want with the generated files. For a magazine or book leanpub is great. If you really want to go the paid blog route, I'm sure we could kit out our own Markua (markdown) to html in worse case scenario.
Re: D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
On Wednesday, 23 December 2015 at 02:36:38 UTC, Rikki Cattermole wrote: On 23/12/15 3:26 PM, Joakim wrote: Are you offering to write for a D blog or to get it set up on leanpub? I'd never use an external platform like leanpub where I don't control the source, as one of the main points would be to add new paid blog features like the ones I've mentioned above. I would be happy to help with leanpub. With regards to pretty much anything. Ok so here is the thing about leanpub. You control the manifest. You can then once published do what ever you want with the generated files. For a magazine or book leanpub is great. If you really want to go the paid blog route, I'm sure we could kit out our own Markua (markdown) to html in worse case scenario. Heh, I think you've missed the point of what I've written a bit: I'd _never_ publish a book or magazine, even if it wasn't in print but primarily online. I consider that almost as bad as telling me to write it on a parchment scroll (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroll). ;) I'd only publish on a tech blog where I control the source and could continuously add paid blogging features like those mentioned previously, which almost nobody is doing today. As such, I find no use for an external platform like leanpub. It wouldn't take much effort to set up a paid blog based on vibe.d, one which you could add new features to over time. The issue is that I'd have to find D devs who want to write for it, as I'm not the right person to write about D (I'd probably edit articles and run the tech/business side). I've been thinking about contacting various D devs to see how much interest there is- I mentioned that I contacted one guy already- but I wasn't sure if I myself wanted to put time into this. I really want to put these paid blogging ideas into use one day, but maybe D isn't the place to do it.
Re: D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
It is all beyond idiotic: it is amazing how long antiquated ideas stick around, only because people cannot imagine anything else. I agree 100%. I published 4 books for Amazon Kindle, then stopped for exactly this reason. You can do so much more advanced stuff on the web than in an ebook. I run http://tutorials.jenkov.com which has a good bit above 1 million page views a month. I do a few videos too. I just publish as I write. I earn a bit of money from the ads, but it's not that much money. The % of people browsing with ad blockers is rising. How would a paid blog work? Subscription? Texts hidden behind a pay wall? Hard to get it into the search engines then...
Re: D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
All decent ideas- I've been thinking recently about setting up a paid blog for articles by D devs- but without someone to explore and push them, they will go nowhere, ie somebody has to do the work of wrangling the writers and docs. What do you mean by a "paid blog" ?
Re: D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 15:33:50 UTC, Jakob Jenkov wrote: Simple, a blog that you pay to read. :) It's amazing to me that people still continue to pump out books, such an outdated form, simply because it has an existing payment model in place, rather than trying new paid models online. Simply churning out ebooks or the equivalent is all they do, when so much more is possible online, everything from pay-per-post to comments. The lack of imagination is simply stunning. I agree. A website / blog allows links to videos etc. and it can be expanded over time, and indexed by search engines. Have you considered using LeanPub for this? Never heard much about them. Looking at their site now, I like that they focus on getting chapters in front of readers right away, while they're being written (which almost every writer should be doing), but don't like their emphasis on producing books at the end. A categorized/tagged blog with comments is a much better experience than a static book with a table of contents and index, yet they import blog posts and turn them into a book! The only reason is that books have a long-standing payment model in place: it's as though everyone were still selling buggies because there are only buggy dealers and no car dealers yet. It is all beyond idiotic: it is amazing how long antiquated ideas stick around, only because people cannot imagine anything else.
Re: D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 16:10:23 UTC, Joakim wrote: It is all beyond idiotic: it is amazing how long antiquated ideas stick around, only because people cannot imagine anything else. What you're describing sounds basically like a magazine... paid freelance authors contributing articles.
Re: D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 16:16:53 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote: On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 16:10:23 UTC, Joakim wrote: It is all beyond idiotic: it is amazing how long antiquated ideas stick around, only because people cannot imagine anything else. What you're describing sounds basically like a magazine... paid freelance authors contributing articles. Heh, never thought of that analogy. :) I can see why you might think that, because a blog is continually produced by many writers, like a weekly magazine, as opposed to a single end product written by one person over a year or two, like a book. There is some similarity to magazines, though bloggers wouldn't be forced to any schedule, even weekly. As for the paid freelancer aspect, magazines pay by the piece and I think they usually keep the copyright, because they had that bargaining power. With paid blogs, you'd do revenue-sharing, with the writer getting 70%+ of the money their posts garnered, and keeping their copyright, similar to the deal LeanPub makes. There's just too much competition for writers these days for them to get much less than that. But the biggest difference is that online is a much more dynamic format, with all kinds of innovations to come, with everything from tipping extra for articles you like, as you might for good service at a restaurant, to building recommendation systems to find the best customized selection of posts for _you_ to read. If you'd have told me at the inception of the Web 25 years ago that most writers would still make money primarily through _print books_ in 2015, I'd have said you're nuts. And yet, sadly, that's where we are today.
Re: D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 15:24:23 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 12:55:19 UTC, Jakob Jenkov wrote: All decent ideas- I've been thinking recently about setting up a paid blog for articles by D devs- but without someone to explore and push them, they will go nowhere, ie somebody has to do the work of wrangling the writers and docs. What do you mean by a "paid blog" ? Simple, a blog that you pay to read... In the age of "FREE" everywhere do you really expects people paying for a blog? I don't think so. You may go with ads instead! Bubba.
Re: D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 17:01:17 UTC, Joakim wrote: The problem is ads make no money for the vast majority of writers, so they have to write a book and sell it to make writing worth their time. This is why you have to pay for almost all the D books, with free online books like Ali's the rare exception to the rule. I see, but I thought the money was for the D Consortium/Organization. Anyway it's really a big problem, if you see, currently sites like: vice, verge, medium etc. They all work with ads, every time you see a "click bait" title. I remember paying $50 ~ $80 for Programming books, but that were the old times, today with ebooks and piracy things are bad. Bubba.
Re: D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 16:51:38 UTC, Bubbasaur wrote: On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 15:24:23 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 12:55:19 UTC, Jakob Jenkov wrote: All decent ideas- I've been thinking recently about setting up a paid blog for articles by D devs- but without someone to explore and push them, they will go nowhere, ie somebody has to do the work of wrangling the writers and docs. What do you mean by a "paid blog" ? Simple, a blog that you pay to read... In the age of "FREE" everywhere do you really expects people paying for a blog? I don't think so. You may go with ads instead! The problem is ads make no money for the vast majority of writers, so they have to write a book and sell it to make writing worth their time. This is why you have to pay for almost all the D books, with free online books like Ali's the rare exception to the rule. Most readers know they have to pay for quality. If you don't want to, that's up to you.
Re: D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
On Sunday, 20 December 2015 at 21:09:31 UTC, Jakob Jenkov wrote: I was thinking that the D Consortium could function as publisher of D books too, for the following (obvious) reasons: [...] All decent ideas- I've been thinking recently about setting up a paid blog for articles by D devs- but without someone to explore and push them, they will go nowhere, ie somebody has to do the work of wrangling the writers and docs.
D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?
I was thinking that the D Consortium could function as publisher of D books too, for the following (obvious) reasons: 1) To raise money for the D Consortium (from sales) 2) To increase the available documentation about D 3) Increased amount of documentation might lead to increased adoption. Those in the D community who have experience writing books could chip in with a chapter each. The books could then be put together as EPUB and the D Consortium could self publish them online (e.g. for Amazon Kindle). I have self published a few books on Amazon about programming. It's not that hard to do, once you get the first one done. The books could be smaller with a more narrow scope, to get them done faster. For instance, one book about D collections, one book about D IO etc. The price range could be around $5 - $9.99 . I think that is a fair price - especially if developers know that the profits goes back into the D Consortium. Each sold book on Amazon for $9.99 should be able to give a profit of $7 to the D Consortium. Another option to raise money and increase the documentation for D would be to make an Android / iOS app which collects all the D documentation in one app. The app could work like an e-book. It is possible to charge a subscription fee for apps. Thus, supporters could pay e.g. $1 / month - or $6 a year for the app. The money would go to the D Consortium. In return subscribers would support D, and have all their D documentation gathered in one place. An app would also be able to link to videos, or articles around the web about D. Yes, I know it's a lot of work etc. but it's not impossible. Writing a focused book of around 100 pages can be done in 3-6 months. If more people chip in, it might even be faster.
