freeculture-about-edition-en.xml

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<chapter label="" id="c-about-this-edition">

  <title>About this edition</title>

  <para>
This edition of <citetitle>Free Culture</citetitle> is the result of
three years of volunteer work.  The idea came from a discussion I had
around ten years ago with a friend about the copyright debate in
Norway, and how rarely the negative sides of stronger copyright
regulation are mentioned in public.  The summer of 2012 I finally had
a look again at the idea and decided to publish a Norwegian Bokmål
edition of <citetitle>Free Culture</citetitle>, translated and
formatted by volunteers, as it describes the problem area very well.
This new English edition is a by-product of this translation project.
  </para>

  <para>
Thanks to the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, I already had
experience translating Docbook documents, and it seemed like a good
format for this book too.  I found a Docbook formatted version of the
book created by Hans Schou, and after some work I was able to
transform it to into a book.  This was the start of the translation
project.  I added a way to create both English and Bokmål versions,
and called for volunteers to help me with the translation.
  </para>

  <para>
Several people joined, and the following even helped with the English
version.  Ralph Amissah and his SiSu version provided index entries.
Morten Sickel and Alexander Alemayhu helped with the figures,
redrawing some of the bitmaps as vector images.  Håkon Wium Lie helped
me track down a good replacement font without usage restrictions
instead of the one in the original edition.  The typesetting is done
using dblatex, which was selected over the alternatives thanks to the
invaluable and quick help from Benoît Guillon and Andreas Hoenen.
Thomas Gramstad helped me understand the ISBN system, so I could get
the ISBN numbers needed make book store distribution possible.  Marc
Jeanmougin from the inkscape community helped me replicate the
original front cover.
  </para>

  <para>
The support from Lawrence Lessig has been valuable, and I am very glad
for his prompt and positive response.  I am impressed he still had the
original screen shots, more than eleven years after the book was
published for the first time.
  </para>

  <para>
I am very grateful to Mari and the rest of my family for their
patience with me in this project.
  </para>

  <para>
&ndash; Petter Reinholdtsen, Oslo 2015-10-17
  </para>

</chapter>