Since more than ten years we are writing and publishing books about open source software, mainly about Joomla and Drupal.
We started with Pearson Education Germany, with whom we have had for many years a good partnership.
Many years ago, we decided to publish while writing, which was supported by Pearson Education Germany to a certain extend.
However, times are changing, and the publishing industry is not changing that fast, until today.
Since two years we are a publisher by ourselves.
Our books are freely available on our website in HTML and PDF, and of course, you can still buy them either as ePub or as “real” books via Amazon.
And today, we reached the 500,000 downloads for the Joomla books! There are only few countries, where we had no downloads from, e.g. Chad, North Korea, South Sudan, Lesotho, Central African Republic.
Why did we decided to end the contract with a big publishing house and do all the work by ourselves?
First of all, it’s not about money, you can’t get rich, it’s even difficult to earn a substantial part for your living.
There are some other reasons behind:
- it’s a way to show our competencies
- it’s a good and useful complement for our trainings and consulting
- we can react in a timely manner on changes and new releases and being up-to-date
- we can interact with our readers, get valuable feedback
So, all that helps us.
Why do we get massive support from others?
- We offer a great resource to those which do not want or cannot afford to buy a book
- We are engaged within a worldwide community to translate the books into other languages (e.g., the Joomla 2.5 Beginner’s Guide has been released in 9 different languages: German, English, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Chinese, Farsi, Italian, French, few others are in work!
- Those who translate, learn and grow personally by enhancing their competencies.
- We sell ads to compensate the efforts of those who translate and party our costs for preparing and maintaining the infrastructure.
- Those who advertise, gain a lot of visibility and publicity.
- We invite others to write a chapter and thus contribute their knowledge and show their competencies.
- With all that, we spread the word about Joomla (and other projects) around and help the projects to grow. A lot of people distribute these guides by implementing the Joomla book module on their sites.
All in all, it’s a good balance of giving and taking.
On May 23, 2012, we even published, after a discussion in the Joomla marketing chat, the direct links to the PDF-download of the Joomla 2.5 Beginner’s Guide at http://docs.joomla.org/Getting_Started_with_Joomla
Unfortunately, all these links have been removed by Chris Davenport at July 27, 2012 as that publication clearly violates the self-promotion rule (policy http://docs.joomla.org/JDOC:Wiki_policy).
However, there are a lot of people out there, which appreciate our work and it feels great to work with lot’s of inspiring people and be able to contribute to the Joomla project.
Thanks to all who supported our work!