Editing question

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navypod
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Editing question

Post by navypod » January 12th, 2014, 11:43 am

I have created a 1,000 page reference book for Podiatry. My goal is to e-publish the document in a format that can't be reproduced and copied. This would be a clinical reference tool for Podiatrists, and I have invested countless hours in its creation. I can't simply publish the existing 1000 page document as it would have copyright violations, is too wordy, and needs to be "cleaned up." So I want to go page by page and highlight or somehow identify the text that I want to pull out of it for final publication. The final document would probably contain only about 500 pages, and I would like for it to be readable on a cell phone or tablet. I currently use Adilko and load a pdf format to my phone.

I wanted to ask how to e-publish the book, and more importantly at this stage another question: I would like to select certain parts of each page to publish, while retaining the rest of each page's contents in my original source document. (This is hard for me to explain) In other words, I want to "highlight" certain parts of my text for publication. If I don't do this, I would have to rewrite another text with the parts that I want to publish, which would be too time consuming.

longknife
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Re: Editing question

Post by longknife » January 13th, 2014, 12:44 pm

As for editing - one of the best tips I ever got was to take the mss and increase the size of either the document or the font. It will put it "in your face" and you'll see things you didn't during other edits.

As for self-publishing. MobiPocket is a free download to get a mss into Kindle format. Nook has it's own internal program. CreateSpace and Smashwords give you guidance on what to upload.

A thought - if it's a specialized work on Podiatry, why don't you just submit it to whatever society covers the specialty?

Are are you looking to make money out of it?

Anyhow, good luck.
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polymath
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Re: Editing question

Post by polymath » January 13th, 2014, 3:14 pm

Microsoft Word and Corel WordPerfect's editing features allow modifying a source document into another document. Simply save the original with a different name. Like Source.wpd saved as Edited.wpd. Edit the Edited.wpd to your heart's content. Then compare the documents, labeled "Compare" in Wordperfect. In Word, use "track changes."

The other issue of copyright infringement is challenging, and maybe more an issue of plagiarism than copyright infringement, Since the work seems to me a compliation of priorly published, fact-based scientific-medical works, hence covered by the Fair Use doctrine, the issue is not so severe as would be for creative writing. Citing sources in a conventional style, say, following the AMA Manual of Style: A Guide for Authors and Editors, gives sufficient credit to those other works to pass muster. Paraphrase as much as possible but still credit the sources. Inline citation referring to a bibliography of sources listed at the end of each chapter or as an appendix at the end are the basics. Artwork, though, used from them requires express use permission.

As concerns digital publication, self-published I assume, depends on revenue stream considerations. Post a PDF on a personal web site open to anyone at no charge, that's done. If revenue is wanted, publish at Amazon as a Kindle book with attached price and royalty earnings or Barnes & Noble's Nook, or through Lulu.com for broader distribution potentials. Lulu offers a distribution package that lists titles in library and education bookstore catalogs for acquisition by, say, medical school student bookstores.
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navypod
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Re: Editing question

Post by navypod » January 19th, 2014, 12:10 pm

Thank you very much for the replies.

I don't believe I would make a significant amount of money from the book as my target reader population is pretty small (there are only about 15,000 podiatrists in the United States). However, there are some similar books/guides that are similar to mine that are pirated and circulating around. I don't want this to happen with mine. If I post a pdf of the book on my website, would others be able to copy it and circulate it, or could I post in a way that people have to go to my website to access it?

Rather than export my book to word and then delete unwanted portions, I would like to highlight/annotate portions of my original document (currently in apple Pages software) to export. Then I would export the annotated parts to another document for final editing. But I don't think Pages software will do this, and am looking for a software that will do this.

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polymath
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Re: Editing question

Post by polymath » January 19th, 2014, 7:43 pm

Access to a digital publication is among the most appreciable piracy and ease concerns. I can't in good conscience recommend aggressively restricting access. The more a digital publication's access is restricted, the more inconvenient accessing it becomes, the more likely interest will be limited. Restrictive Distribution Rights Management, DRM, are a bother for potential fact-based text consumers.

Who are the consumers? Podiatrists and perhaps oesteopaths, orthopedists, sports medicine practitioners, musculoskelatal caregivers, etc. Plus medical-legal litigation practitioners: medical trial lawyers and expert medical witnesses.

What do they want from such a publication? Convenient, reliable, accessible, and reproducible reference resources. Restrictive DRM prevents copying reference excerpts. Less restrictive or no DRM allows users convenient features like search, select, copy, and print.

For the matter at hand and its potential audiences, such a publication is subject to the most lenient Fair Use doctrine exceptions for appropriate and responsible reproduction. The users will want to cite, copy, reproduce excerpts for personal, individual copy, sharing, and evidentiary discovery testimony exhibits purposes. I believe publishing such a work behooves its publisher to make access as easy as practical.

A workaround that accommodates all the concerns and issues of preventing wholesale copyright piracy might publish the whole as an encyclopedic Web site reference. Each discreet topic gets its own page, with a Table of Contents, an index, and suitable appendices with active links to their referenced content, and with cross links on content pages to related content and subject keywords. The whole document is broken up into discrete parts but not accessible in its entirety all at once, except perhaps as a print edition, which has automatic, ample, built in reproduction protections due to simpler and cheaper just buying the print book than photocopying the whole. This type of digital publication then is conveniently and easily accessible from a mobile device, laptop, or workstation desktop.

A password protected login would be the only reasonable restriction to access. The password might be assigned after a user has paid a timed subscription fee, say monthly or annually. Some meaningful content should be open access to guest visitors so they can sample the quality and usefulness and ease of access to the whole.

As to software and complications of selecting and moving excerpts to another working draft, I'm familiar with Word, WordPerefect, and other publication softwares like InDesign and Adobe Acrobat, as well as WYSIWYG Web site design software, DreamWeaver and FrontPage and such and basic raw source code formatting: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc., and their cross platform compatability potentials and issues. I see using any other wordprocessor software as similar in as much as resaving a document under a different file name and editing it as a best practice strategy, no matter the software type or operation system and hardware platform.
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