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[quintin522]

I propose that we compile all the most popular community games & stories, such as Boatmurdered, and turn them into an eBook that can be downloaded from the site. This would serve two purposes;

1. An easy way to get people interested in DF. If you're trying to get someone to play, or someone finds the website and is interested in playing, they could download and read it. Exposed to the awesomeness that is DF, they would have to play.

2. Not having to go through a whole bunch of posts to read these stories.

Anyone interested?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Due to confusion, I'm editing this post to say I did not mean sell the eBook. It would be free

9/30/09
Status update. Been working on it on and off for a while. Copypasta takes much longer than i thought it would, with all the images. And then the resizing. And then the pictures sometimes take up a whole page.  the horror...
Anyway, I began with Boatmurdered. So far, 277 pages, which is about 75% of the way done.  I expect to be finished and upload it in a couple of days

[Jiri Petru]

Copyright infringement. Sorry.

[Jay]

Copyright infringement. Sorry.

Care to elaborate?
There's no copyright on the text posted herein.

[Armok]

I can't help, at least in any way I know of, but I greatly approve of this!

I never read the stories section of the forum since a year or so ago, it simply becomes to much, and having famus forts like Headshots and Nist Akath in a printer-friendly format might actualy let me start t work my way through catching up. Even the amount of filtering and such to get the stuff down to a single books worth of the very best parts would help a lot.

[Untelligent]

Why download/print them when you could just put them up on an archive site?

Bandwith issues?

[Capntastic]

There's already a bunch of archival sites.  Making an eBook would be legally iffy, since you'd need the 'okay' from all of the contributors.  Even if it's free, I think.

[Dasleah]

Plus it would fall under Toady's 'No Merchandising' rule. Or at least be complicated enough not to bother - getting all the signed permission of all the contributors / creators, dealing with those who want a percent or lump sum to give permission, what to do when you can't contact a person or can't give them the money they want, editing the forum-based ones...

[Spreggo]

I don't think the idea is to sell the ebook. Its just a file with all the stories. It could even be an HTML file. Like the archive sites already are.

Just more comprehensive and downloadable as a zip.

[quintin522]

Im going to go edit my first post and put this in there, but I didn't mean sell the eBook.

I just meant for it to be an easy way to go back and read your favorite DF games and stories without going through archives; or having to go in a thread and skip between comments to get to the actual postings.

Unless anyone can think of a reason not to, I'm going to start on it. I'm just going to do the completed ones in The Hall of Legends http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=41896.0

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So much copypasta!

[Reasonableman]

Hrm, doesn't sound like a bad idea. It'd certainly be helpful not to have to trawl through the forums for the story-related posts.

Brings up a question, though; do we preserve the original texts, or proof and edit them? Also, pitchurs?

[TheDJ17]

I'd really be okay with just a .pdf file since I don't/never will have an eBook.

[Spreggo]

I'd really be okay with just a .pdf file since I don't/never will have an eBook.

'ebook' is just a term for a literature in some digital format (pdf included), laid-out similarly to a book.

[Untelligent]

Argh, I hate .pdfs. They only advantage they have over standard html webpages that I can think of is that they're pretty much laid out exactly as they're going to print, which isn't that much of an advantage if you're not going to download and print them.

Seriously, what would the advantage of this over the archive sites?

[Sensei]

That's what I was thinking.

Also, if you're going the extra mile, you may want to do something allowing people to show/hide posts that aren't directly part of the story, but are worth reading or are alluded to, so people get the jokes and know what's happening, and whatnot.

Be a bitch to do, of course.

[Niveras]

Seriously, what would the advantage of this over the archive sites?

'Accessibility'? Could same the .pdf, stick it on your mobile computer, and enjoy some stories while outside a wifi zone (which may or may not apply depending on how developed your place of residence is). Though you could easily archive your own copy of a website for offline browsing, a .pdf or similar is generally a single file and is carried over between platforms.