I have 20 years of education books to put into PDF..for homeschoolers

[woodsmoke]

I just saw the notice for Ubuntu Christian Edition on Distrowatch...

I'm a retired thirty four science teacher in the Buckle of the Bible Belt who has published 16 books of Science related activities...

I spent three years in teaching in a Christian School after I retired, but the school closed and I'm now at a junior college...

I'm a long time linux user who has donated well into a hundred machines with Linux on them... and use Linux exclusively....except for the stuff I have to do for work at the J/C... :(

I'm in the process of putting all my books into PDF form and with video/sound... for homeschoolers...

Christian Ubuntu and I are a lock and key....

these texts could be put into the repository....

Christ stands at the door and knocks.... does anyone answer?

woodsmoke

[tgalati4]

You open the door and Christ says:

"Grabs yo nets, weese goin' fishing!"

[woodsmoke]

You did hear the one about the three preachers that went fishing...

They all took a boat over to a little island and were fishing, one of them said he needed something from the car...

and walked across the water... got the stuff came back...

the third fisherman said...hmmm wonder if I've got enough faith to do that....

the second one said he had to get a bunch of plastic worms from the car...walked across the water, came back with the worms...

the third one... sezee to himself...sezee....."hmmm....wonder if my faith is enough to do that....?"

So....he stands up...hitches his pants up a little and allowed as mebbe he needed to go to the car for some spare hooks....

Steps out on the water.....and DOWN he goes! blub, blub, blub.....

The first preacher turns to the second and says...."Ahhhh....ya reckon we oughta tell him about the rocks?"

yeppers...to that....

Lets cast a net.......catanet....na...this isn't a bolero....but anyway... let's cast a net!

woodsmoke

[tgalati4]

That's a good one.

I take it from your post that you are looking for volunteers to help you put these books into PDF form?

[woodsmoke]

Hi
I'm typing this on CE as we exchange phosphors...:lol:

No....I can do that, what I will need, if there is the deisre for them is to develop a method of placing them somewhere that they can be put into a repository.

The easy way around might be for me to email them to somebody's throw away e-mail addy and then they can be run up the flagpole and if anybody salutes then I can do more.

Thanks for the reply!

Looks like it'll be a lot of fun! :)

woodsmoke

[tgalati4]

Sounds like you need a church website to host the books for you.

Perhaps something like: wingsoffaith.com/media.php

[woodsmoke]

Hi
possibly

I got a bunch of weird sites with the paste.

Also got a radio station at Last FM! :)

anyhow this looked like what you may have been indicating...

www.wingsoffaith.org/

yes/no/other? :lol:

thanks...

woodsmoke

[tgalati4]

Brainfart on my part:

That should be wingsoffaith.org/media.php (click on the "Complete List ...")

That's not a radio station, it is simply an mp3 server (gnump3d) of our church services. You can modify the server to serve books and PDF's. You can make custom tabs based on topics. It's completely customizable.

[deantn]

Hi
I'm typing this on CE as we exchange phosphors...:lol:

No....I can do that, what I will need, if there is the deisre for them is to develop a method of placing them somewhere that they can be put into a repository.

The easy way around might be for me to email them to somebody's throw away e-mail addy and then they can be run up the flagpole and if anybody salutes then I can do more.

Thanks for the reply!

Looks like it'll be a lot of fun! :)

woodsmoke

Have plenty of homeschoolers around these parts that might be interested in getting them.
Lt us know when the first might be available for DL. Thanks for putting them on the net.

[lix]

I'm in the "bible belt", too. We homeschool two & are part of several homeschool groups in the MS capital city area. We'd be interested in what you have.

[az]

these texts could be put into the repository....



Under what licence would you like to distribute them?

I would suggest a DFSG-comptible licence such as Creative Commons Attribution/share-alike. If you distribute it under a more restricive licence, (like adding a non-commercial clause), then it would become a "non-free" work, in terms of the repositories, since the user must be able to use the work for any purpose. Multiverse is a "non-free' repository.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/

These books may be useful to the Edubuntu project, as well, and the less restrictive the licence under which you release, the easier it is for other projects to incorporate them.

Public Domain (no restrictions whatsoever) is also DFSG-compliant, but I would not recommend that....

[az]

... I also wonder if releasing them in a more generic format would be more effective. For example, if they were in docbook format upstream (from you) then downstream projects could easily automate the process of turning them into html, pdf or whatever format they would need. That would open the door to easy translations into any other language, for example...

[deantn]

Has he posted any of his books yet?
Would be nice if he has as I have a few waiting to see what he has.

[Feba]

I don't think the repos are a good place for pdf downloads, are they? I thought they were just for programs.

That said, since it's only going to be PDF (and I suppose audio/video, so mp3/avi), why not distribute it as a torrent? They don't take much more know-how to use, Ubuntu comes with Bittorrent built in, and you could distribute it to quite a few more people that way.

[cjm5229]

My wife and I are also homeschooling our three boys and would love to see Science books with a Christian Point of View. Az has a good point on the licensing, Always need some red tape somewhere. Good luck and keep us posted.

[az]

I don't think the repos are a good place for pdf downloads, are they? I thought they were just for programs.


That's a good point, but it is a grey-zone. A few years back, a Debian developer argued that the Constitution of Finland was DFSG-compliant and was ready to package it. There are packages for artwork, example content (text, audio and video) as well as documentation packages.

It depends on the project. If this is right-up-the alley for a particular project (Edubuntu or Ubuntu CE) it might be right to put it in. There are guidelines for what goes into the repos and what does not.

Always need some red tape somewhere.

The thing about CC licencing is it is just as simple ans picking one and stating that the content you release is to be distributed under that lience. No pain. Takes two seconds.

[urukrama]

I seriously doubt Ubuntu/Canonical would put them in the official (ed)ubuntu repositories. Given that they are science books from a Christian school, there is undoubtedly some Christian perspectives in them. I don't have a problem with that per se, but I can imagine many people and educators would. Since the whole creationism vs. evolution is such a hot topic for many, adding anything like it to the repos might damage Ubuntu's reputation in some circles. We are not talking about mere applications here, but about worldviews and, sadly, politics.

[Feba]

I don't think anyone wants to see them in edubuntu repos, they want them in Ubuntu CE repos, which is what this forum is for.

I still say that torrenting them would be the best, as they could then be easily distributed to ANY linux, mac, windows, and almost certainly other platforms such as FreeBSD too.

[urukrama]

I don't think anyone wants to see them in edubuntu repos, they want them in Ubuntu CE repos, which is what this forum is for.

There are no Ubuntu CE repos.

[HunkirDowne]

I'd like to see what you have as well (the proverbial "me too" ;-)).

We're homeschooling in SE Georgia and there are several h/s groups. The one we belong to has, as a guess, 20-30 families active in the group. I don't know the size of the others but then there's the Jacksonville, Fla. area to the south with a mess o' groups. I'm sure the word would spread -- we will get your link published and share with the folks in Jax including the bookstore we frequent, Rock Solid (I think that's the name).

I really like the fishing preachers joke, btw.

Take care,
Duane

[ginnie6]

I'd be interested too......in SC and our group is about 50 families. We're also in contact with several other groups so we could definitely pass the info on.

[runkidrun]

What If You Put Them In A Google Book Layout? It Would Then Be Easier To Access. No Repositories, Just A URL.

Here Is The Google Book Layout:

http://books.google.com/books?id=6S8LAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA226&dq=pilgrims+progress#PPA225,M1

I Would Be Willing To Help If You Are Interested.

[loserboy]

keep us posted when you get the books up, I want to have a look.

[ccfjeff]

Hi,

I don't think any of these repositories are exactly the type of option you are looking for, but they might be of some use to you if even only on a temporary or experimental basis.

You can get 5 GB of free online storage from esnips.com (http://www.esnips.com/NewAccountAction.ns?action=init&v2=info&gclid=CLnnkeeZpYkCFSMkWAodSG5tUA). You can upload and share virtually any kind of file. You can make your folders and/or files public and include tags so that others searching esnips could find them. You can also send links to others or post them on a website etc. and people can go right to them.

I have used them for awhile, primarily for sound files, but you can also use pictures or assorted types of documents.

BTW, as others have already expressed, I personally prefer files in some format other than .pdf. Acrobat seems to be a memory hog for me and it is more difficult to search and read .pdf files for me, and then as others noted, they have to be converted unless you have their expensive software, perhaps, to other formats if you want to work with any of the content, such as translating it, adding hyperlinks etc.

Of course, if your only copies are in printed form, you would almost have to scan them into .pdf format and then convert them, so I could see where one would not necessarily want to go through that time consuming and tedious process if they didn't have to.

If you already have them in .doc format or something similar, however, I personally wouldn't convert them to .pdf for a project such as this.

Here are a couple of other sites that will host files for free:

Share Big File: www.sharebigfile.com/service.php (http://www.sharebigfile.com/service.php)
Quick Sharing: http://s3.quicksharing.com/index.php

I don't know much about them other than I had saved the URLs at one time.

I also remember reading not too long ago about a system that the article touted as superior in many ways to the popular bitTorrent file sharing system.

Unfortunately, I don't remember the name right now, but I think it was along the lines of those .alt.groups

I believe it is an older system from the earliest days of the internet and one that is no longer as popular. As I remember the article, it was a subscription type system so you had to pay to belong, but there was a free trial period of 3 or 6 months or something like that.

Some of the details might not be absolutely perfectly correct, but here is what I remember of it:

You could upload even very large files and anyone other subscriber could download them for free. The speed for both upload and download was much faster than other options, such as bitttorrent or free online repositories etc. The files would remain online for at least 6 months. If no one downloaded them over that time they would be deleted.

It might be worth checking out if someone knows what I am talking about and can provide a link or at least a name to google. If you had everything in order, you could upload everything there and let other members know about it. If it were popular enough for others to continue to download they could apparently stay up there for many years even if you did not renew your subscription.

Someone had mentioned Google's online book program and I have wondered about that. There are many many books and manuscripts etc. that are beyond any copyright dates and I wonder if they would be interested in including them in their online archives. They have taken a lot of heat and been sued repeatedly, I believe, for scanning books that were not in the public domain. Some of those older religious documents might not be as popular as some of the newer secular stuff, but it could add thousands of terrabytes to their database and wouldn't rile up a bunch of lawyers to come after them.

They might be interested in even scanning and hosting them if you let them know they wouldn't have any copyright issues with you.

[ccfjeff]

Here is Google's page for publishers/authors that want to partner with them:

https://books.google.com/partner/?hl=en_US