Hi all,

I'm working with Roger Wagner to publish Volume 2 of Assembly Lines: The Book (https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5055825W/Assembly_Lines) . The plan is to publish a combined book containing all of the content of Volume 1 plus all of the unpublished Softalk articles. The softcover would be around $10 while the hardcover would be around $20, both available from Amazon.

I have two questions...
1) Would you be interested in purchasing a copy of this book?
2) Do you think there is enough interest to do a Kickstarter for funding?

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

Cheers,
Chris
http://www.softalkapple.com/content/assembly-lines-roger-wagner-no-1-oct-1980

Unless the goal is to make a small profit, how about just publishing it as a .pdf? It could be hosted without charge on this website, in the books section, at http://6502.org/documents/books/ . That should be a lot less work, and you can get it out sooner, and if you find errors later, you can update it quickly.

_________________
http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

Hi Garth,

Well, that's an interesting idea. I think if the goal was to just get the articles out there, it would certainly be easy to scan them in, clean them up a bit, and then just append them together into a big PDF. But my vision is to produce the book as if it had been published "for real" 30 years ago, except with a more modern look and format. I'm thinking about David Finnigan's The New Apple II User's Guide and Steven Weyhrich's Sophistication & Simplicity, which are both impressive because they are about "retro computing" but are produced with a modern design.

I'd like to make the book into something that I would be proud to have on my bookshelf, rather than just gathering the relevant information. There won't be any profit at all, except perhaps to round up to the nearest "whole" dollar, and I'm sure I'll lose that on complimentary copies, shipping, etc.

But thanks so much for responding! I'd love to hear more feedback.

-Chris

You could make a modern .pdf, and do both, having it available for download and also printed version available from the same .pdf. The easiest would be scanning with a little cleaning up, but maybe next would be OCR to put the text into a modern look and format and further process it and re-do diagrams, add photos, etc., and the bigger project would be if you actually revise it, re-writing portions, updating for later Apple II's that used the 65c02, the IIgs with its 65816, etc.. The online version can have all the color pictures you could want, without the extra expense that color adds to printing, and if someone wants to print it off in B&W, they still can. Whatever you decide, I wish you success.

_________________
http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

These are all good ideas. Thanks. I'll keep posting updates along the way.

These ideas are not exclusive: for a print on demand service you typically prepare a PDF. Some people make the PDF itself available for free, some for a small charge, as well as selling the book. There's no capital needed because there's no minimum print run.

For a recent example of book-only, see http://wozpak.callapple.org/ which is a 350 page cleaned up collation of original Apple 1 and Apple ][ documents for $45, prepared by Bill Martens and Brian Wiser.

For an example of PDF, ebook and print-on-demand, with all the material also freely available on the website, see http://aosabook.org/en/buy.html which now offers 3 volumes.

I think it's an important principle to let people see what they are buying - either one or two sample chapters or the whole thing. Probably someone somewhere will pirate your book in any case, but if you make a PDF available you'll reach a lot more people and some of them will want to buy a physical copy. (Or an ebook)

Cheers
Ed

Hello,

Just in case I have'nt answered already to a similar post on comp.sys.apple2,...
I'll be happy to purchase such related reference material about one of my preferred computers of the 80' at the announced price rate.
In case an epub (in addition to a pdf) version is going to be published as well, I'll be happy to spend some extra bucks in order to benefit from those two new supports.

I wish you best of success in your enterprise,
Best regards,
Benoît

Thanks everyone for the feedback. I'm thinking now that I'll do just a hardcover and an epub (no softcover). That should cut down on the complexity and make everyone happy.

In case you're curious, I'm up to chapter 12 out of 33. Plus all of the appendices are done except the dreaded Appendix B with the detailed descriptions of the assembly instructions.

Also, there is now a website over at the Softalk Apple Project:
http://www.softalkapple.com/content/chris-torrence-roger-wagner-volunteer-archivist

Cheers,
Chris

(I see the book was finished and published and is available as print on demand - well done!
http://www.softalkapple.com/blogs/assem ... plete-book
http://www.lulu.com/shop/roger-wagner/a ... 59093.html

There's also a series of (presently) 35 video blogs on the topic:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... kGRciah7aL
)

The completed book was announced in another thread December 2014, see viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3127&p=35763

Lulu and Amazon. I bought mine from Lulu in 2015, IIRC it was slightly cheaper there, but it takes a bit longer - they have to literally print it first.
Book looks good. I like to have that kind of material in hardcopy. Not that I think I need another book on 6502 assembly at this stage, at least not to survive.. but I like them.

(Thanks for the extra info and pointer to the new thread. I landed in this thread from a search, so it seemed worthwhile to add a pointer. BTW this book is now listed in the books page here on 6502.org.)

Thanks BigEd for putting in the link. Note that you can also download a PDF of the book along with disk images at:
https://archive.org/details/AssemblyLinesCompleteWagner
Cheers,
Chris
p.s. neither Roger nor I are making any money off of this