three years ago I started writing a 3d-printer cookbook. I toyed with the idea of trying to publish it but moved on to other projects instead. Since I have neglected it for so long I decided to share it with the community in its current incomplete form (on google docs). I’m sure I got some stuff wrong, but I tried pretty hard to keep it accurate. My goal was to provide something like the classic “cmos cookbook” with lots of details about the fundamental building blocks of 3d printers. I’m sure it is too deep in some areas and too light in others.
I see all these people who got started years after me, publishing books and whatnot, and I can’t help thinking to myself: “wtf am I doing with my life?! I should have done a book a long time ago!”
@ThantiK they’re idiotically time consuming to make. Doing it with a publisher (eg meaning clean copyright images, editorial reworks and such) easily doubles the amount of work versus just writing it. Took me 4 years to get my first volume published and that took so much work that I’ve 95% stopped doing the actual 3D printing hobby that the book was about. (Ok, having kids didn’t help either.)
@Randy_Melton Thanks for posting this. Too many people make good stuff and then let it languish on a hard drive without seeing the light of day because it’s not some desired level of perfection.
@Ryan_Carlyle yep, definitely not perfection, I was cleaning mental house and decided I since it was stagnating I should share. Maybe it helps someone 
How about make it an “Open Source” 3d printing book?
@Shawn_Nguyen I’m happy to consider it. I’m not sure what is involved and what the implications are? Does anybody have any advice?
In a sense I am trying to do that but not in the BSD style. I am trying to make it freely available to anyone that wants it. There are unfinished portions that I really wanted to write but competing interests won out. I’m still interested in the “building blocks” descriptions and have researched/build several more but they don’t apply to 3d-printing. I wish there was some “maker building blocks” resource other than adafruit (which I applaud but avoid using). I might be more interested in building or contributing to something like that.
But back to your question. I’m interested just need help/advice.
@Randy_Melton if you provide it under a license that allows people to make and share modifications they might be interested. There are a lot of ways to do that depending on how involved you want to be in the long term. Are you aware of the suite of “creative commons” licenses?
If you let people create derivative works, others might be willing to do the work of converting from a Google doc to a format that others can collaboratively edit.
If you decide you want to self-publish, you could use a license that gives you permission to publish a work that incorporates the contributions of others. However, if you reserve that right to yourself, it will be less likely that others will invest substantially to help.
You might look at leanpub for self-publishing in a way that allows you to preserve your rights and ownership. I think they are friendly to open source books. You’ll need to make sure you actually have rights to publish anything you publish if you turn it into an open source project.