Printing books or going further?

In his brilliant speech at this year's eZ Summer Conference in London, Tony Wood mentioned the eZ book production, and how much he would like to see it back.

His challenge has been commented and welcomed by many and it is a fascinating thought. It would be really nice to go all in with some book production in the old fashioned way, really putting some effort into it.

But it is not what we do as our primary business, and it takes a lot of resources and effort to produce, print, sell and distribute them. However, the challenge still stands, so we need to put some fresh thoughts to this. Let us think about other formats and concepts … then we might be all over the idea!

We are in the digital and mobile world
The latest idea that came out of the internal discussions on this topic is, of course, eBooks, distributed through, for instance, Amazon or iTunes. We could distribute ePUB, Kindle Books, and MOBI formats. Now how cool would that be?!

We are also discussing to produce white-papers in these formats first. My suggestion is to produce four white-papers that we can distribute and sell through digital, mobile channels:
1. How to build a single eZ Publish web site
2. How to build a multi-site eZ Publish web solution
3. How to develop an eZ Publish extension
4. How to extend eZ Publish through the REST API

These are mere thoughts thus far, but these can be materialized relatively easy and with reuse of existing materials to some extent.

Anyone with an idea or comment to take this further?

Best regards and have a brilliant Summer everyone!

Geir Arne Waaler

eZ Documentation