Decide on guidelines for new Book Listings content type

1. My preference would be for some type of PREmoderation - just to make sure that everything's correct/follows our standards from the start. This is especially true if we allow self-published or ebooks. Plus, money is involved (affiliate links).

2. Guidelines should be upfront and state that any affiliate links in the node would be for the DA. (So no adding it to the node's body.)

3. Possibly add a link to the book's website/webpage (ie http://crackingdrupal.com/) with the expectation that the node's body provide enough content to describe the book, and not "see my website for details.") I can't tell if this exists already from the dev site.

4. I have no issue with allowing ebooks or self-published books (ie lulu.com) but the author would need to "prove" their an "expert" in the area. (Which goes back to premoderation.) We'll should have taxonomy terms for this.

@jhodgdon - sorry about #4 - taxonomy if for ebooks vs print.

What do we do when second and third editions of books come out? Do we 'deprecate' the older ones? Keep them old ones, but mention that newer versions are available in the node description?

I reviewed the guidelines just now and they seem great to me. My perspectives: I used to help work on this page a few years ago and am also an author. The description and process seem reasonable to me.

My original opinion was that we need to look on how many people do actually add books. My impression was that it's not too many, in that case I'd just grant them a role to do so and would not create this whole process with the issue queue. In case someone else will ever want to add a book - he'll have to contact one of these people. However jhodgdon and silverwing on IRC were strongly in favor of the issue queue flow and I'm ok with this now. Considering we'll allow eBooks (I agree that we should) - there might be more people adding books and issue queue with pre-moderation make sense.

Guidelines look good. Specifically I think that those few people who "maintain" this section and add a lot of books should not go through the issue queue moderation, so I like this line in the current guidelines - "If you have been given permission to publish book listings without review, you can skip this step."

As for the question from the issue summary - I think anyone should be able to create book listings and edit own book listings. But only people with specific permission should be able to edit any book listing.

Also agree on editing existing listing instead of adding new listings for each edition. Once listing is updated we probably should add information about "Previous editions" somewhere on the bottom of the book description.

Instead of just an arbitrary line I'd love to see something of this sort:

Editions:

First edition. Publication date: 1 March 2009. Covered Drupal 6 only.
Second edition. Publication date: 1 April 2011. Updated for Drupal 7.

Not sure how to best word it in the guidelines or maybe we need an additional field on the content type.

I think example will be enough. Added it to http://drupal.org/node/1691562, take a look.

I've contributed to these pages in the past, so just my 2 cents:

1) I disagree with banning non-english language books. I think its appropriate to have them in a separate section and great to be clear that english is "official" language, but it kind of says anything that's not english will never be "good enough" which I think is the wrong message.

2) I support allowing self-published books. At this point, established publishers don't seem to have any more control over experienced people than anyone else.

3) I think it makes more sense to create separate entries for new editions of a book. New editions usually pertain to different editions of books, and it makes it easier (and more intuitive to view) to tag the books by drupal version if this is the case. I think this is also important as people may still be looking for / want to purchase books from older versions to match their current environment, and having separate entries allows for those older links to still be found.

4) Various people seem to monitor this section regularly, so I don't really care whether there is a formal moderation process or not. I like the idea of anyone being able to edit/improve on book entries through. Will the new content type have comments/reviews enabled for it?

RI: Comments - I'm wondering if we should hold off on enabling comments until ratings for projects gets rolled out so we can have a "Review" section/tab for books.

@jhodgdon

RE (1) - fair point, I guess I'd rather this be a more comprehensive/inclusive listing and let users/readers determine quality. To use a previous example, Johan's "Drupal 7 Essentials" hade a review for the swedish version (but wouldn't be listed b/c of non-english) and english version did NOT have a review (potentially wouldn't be listed without a review, even though it was english). Is there a reason the moderation of non-english books couldn't ask for someone from that language to comment about it?

On a related note, is there an issue(s) regarding d.o supporting non-english documentation? I realize this may be a broader policy issue and I would like to find ways to be more inclusive of the more international members of our community. Living in Australia, english suits us well, but we often bump into american/european (unintended) biases in various ways and I think this issue is a good example of that.

@jhodgdon - no, I wasn't suggesting describing non-english books in English. Please also keep in mind that some people are multi-lingual and just because they can write/speak/understand english doesn't mean they wouldn't prefer to learn from a book in a native language. I think by denying non-english books in the list, it makes them harder to find and gives a biased view.

As an example, would there be a problem with a listing like:

[German]
Drupal 7: Das Praxisbuch für Ein- und Umsteiger

Praktisch und verständlich begleitet Sie dieses Buch auf dem Weg zu Ihrer Website mit Drupal 7. Schritt für Schritt lernen Sie die Konzepte des vielseitigen und flexiblen CMS kennen und erstellen ein erstes Beispielprojekt. Sie erfahren, wie Sie das System installieren, die zahlreichen Module nutzen und Ihre Website mit Zusatzfunktionen ausstatten oder das Layout individuell anpassen. Installieren Sie Drupal 7, legen Sie eigene Inhalte an, machen Sie sich mit den Admin-Funktionen vertraut, und erstellen Sie eine erste Website. Mit Inhaltstypen, Hierarchien, Kommentaren, Taxonomie, Benutzern und Berechtigungen strukturieren Sie Ihren Auftritt. Erweitern Sie Ihre Website nach Ihren Anforderungen um weitere Funktionen und Elemente: Editoren und Medienverwaltung für Redakteure, Bildergalerien, Audio- und Videoinhalte, Formulare, Bewertungen, Geodaten und Karten, Termine und Kalender, Newsletter oder mehrsprachige Inhalte, Benutzerstatistiken u.v.m. Lernen Sie zudem die Funktionsweise des Template-Systems von Drupal 7 kennen, und erfahren Sie wie Sie ein benutzerfreundliches Design umsetzen. Außerdem erhalten Sie einen ersten Einblick in die Programmierung eigener Module. Inkl. zahlreicher Tipps zu Themen wie Usability, Suchmaschinen-Optimierung und Performance.

By: Nicolai Schwarz
Drupal version(s): 7
Verlag: Galileo Computing on Sept 28, 2011 (469 Seiten)
ISBN-13: 978-1555707781
http://www.amazon.de/Drupal-Praxisbuch-Umsteiger-Galileo-Computing/dp/38...

(Tags: Category: General, Drupal Version: 7, Level: Beginner, Intermediate)

I can see the tags being in English isn't ideal, but it at least puts the reference on the same level as the other books.

We have received permission from [names of sites we have permission from] to use descriptions of books on Drupal.org. If you obtain description information from another source, be sure to state that in your issue.

In response to #6: We currently only have permission from Packt, as far as I'm aware. I was under the impression that some people had good contacts with other publishers and might be better people to write to those contacts on d.o / DA's behalf than myself, but I can just take the initiative, as I was going to, and write to other publishers asking for permission to use their "official descriptions" on these pages. I have a list of email addresses for legal/permission-type questions which I gathered from all the publishers' websites.

Re: #25. Then you can also delete my comment there (on the guidelines page) that points out this same thing. ;-)

My two cents:

1. Please do not confuse self-published with e-books.. I've self-published my master thesis as a book with lulu.com, and it's a very nice hardcover book with, I believe, a publishing volume of 1. True, there's also an ebook, and making it available on the web is one of the reasons I got involved with Drupal.

2. I like the new guidelines a LOT. I don't so much like the 'prove you're an expert'.. I'd much rather prefer my previous version of: prove the book went through some review phase.. I think a mix here would be the best: prove that your book was reviewed by a Drupal expert. I think the definition of 'being an expert' is very subjective. The objective here is to make sure that a self-published book isn't full of typos and actually makes sense as a book. There's a lot of self-publishing crap coming out nowadays with the name 'Drupal' on the cover, and I'm pretty sure all these authors consider themselves experts.

3. About book editions. I'd much rather that they have different nodes.. A new edition of the book always has a different ISBN, a new cover, new authors and different content and chapters.. It IS a different book, just reusing the name. And if someone is looking into programming for Drupal 5, let them find the book that suits him.

4. There's a lot of 'News and Announcements' posts about books in d.o nowadays, most of them with very good comments. We're a community. Denying the ability to comment is just kicking the book review aspect of the community into amazon.com.

5. I support the idea of an English-only listing (when I maintained the list, I was responsible for deleting the one german book that was there). That doesn't mean that I support the idea of an Amazon US-only buy-it-here link. There's a lot of people in the world that for speed, currency or duty reasons buy their English books from Amazon in Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain or the United Kingdom. The DA should create an affiliate account in each of these countries and the view could display the appropriate one based on the user's location, or simply display all 9 flags and let the user decide where he wants to buy the book (better for caching and anonymous).

João

Hi Jennifer,

1) Sorry, for not making it clear.. When I refer to the confusion between self-published and ebooks, it's about other comments on the thread, not the guidelines doc. However, a related problem may arise when considering Drupal Magazines (such as the Drupal Watchdog) as they're a printed medium covering Drupal. I'd suggest that as a note to rule 3, that in the normal case, the book should have an ISBN number or otherwise a very good reason.

2) "clarify the qualifications of the authors of a book or its quality" seems a lot like "prove you're an expert". I'd prefer to have objective rules on what will be asked. But I'm flexible on this. It may be better to be able for a moderator to say 'I reviewed it and the book sucks', than for the author simply to say: 'I'm an expert and my BFF is also an expert and he reviewed the book - as did my parents - they all said the pictures were nice.'

3+4) Thanks :)

5) Would it be possible to have the current prototype show the proposed layout (all with links to the US store, atm), so that it would be easier to convince the DA to register themselves in the other countries? Or at least start with US, Canada, UK, France and Germany, which I believe may be the best markets for English books. If this proves useful, we could then include Spain, Italy, China and Japan.

Re #28/29:

Re #2: I agree. There are various kinds of "experts" and as long as what is written is accurate and not riddled with typos or other issues, a clear explanation is worth a lot, even if the material is basic enough not to require any kind of "expert". “Well-reviewed” is important, I think.

#3: I agree. Even e-books might have another ISBN. Each format and version should have another node and they can be crosslinked or referenced if we start including content reviews (where content of the ebook is the same as the paperbook, for instance). For now, reviews will only be on Amazon and in comments, though, so... that
brings us to #4.

#4: I was always for having comments on the book listing nodes. This will help people identify the most appropriate books for their needs and know what shortcomings each book has. We should have that on Drupal.org rather than forcing people to do an official "Amazon review".

#5: It's been mentioned. My suggestion would be to have the "most official" local Drupal user group create the affiliate ID for now and use the small income from books sold in the non-U.S. regions go to helping fund DrupalCamps or other events in these regions, or sprints, etc... if this money starts to add up to something, it could go more directly to the D.A. IMHO, providing a link for non-U.S. visitors is a GoodThing™ and if it generates income, that is also good. But it doesn't need to be a hassle.

Regarding #31 (aka #2 again). I think even some of the books that should have been "best reviewed" and which certainly had no shortage of experts have also sometimes had their share of complaints. My suggestion would be that we limit books to certain publishers (that list is not so long) and say that adding to the list of publishers should include proof that the new publisher has some review process in place. I don't really think that there are very many ebook-only Drupal books that are worth purchasing. More filters could be put in place to limit the book listings to only books of quality. As I've said, even some of those with "big names" on the cover have often been written before there was even a stable release (of Drupal X) available.... Admin URL paths often changed, UIs changed... readers could not follow examples in some major books released not so long ago. Personally, I would suggest that any book on Drupal X (where 'X' is a major version of Drupal) which was written before Drupal X is officially released should receive extra scrutiny and be denied listing if it contains substantial inaccuracies, regardless of how many "big names" grace the cover.

Agree on enabling comments and posting new node for the new book edition.
RE: affiliate links for other countries - discussion of this idea should not slow us down. We have basic listing ready and we should go on and deploy it. Changes always can be done later and more links added once we have what to add.

Agreed. Other affiliate links could wait and could (fairly easily) be added after deployment.

Hi jhodgdon. I mentioned this on the "create views/content types" issue and you suggested I post this thought in the "guidelines" discussion here, so here goes:

Currently we only list books "about Drupal", but I've been thinking that it makes sense to also include other related topics of interest to Drupal community members, e.g. mobile development topics, JavaScript / jQuery, various database technologies, PHP, Symfony, HTML5, CSS3, responsive design, Agile development, project management... to name just a few possible topics. Such topics might actually be of greater interest to the average Drupal.org member who likely knows the basics of Drupal and can find loads of information in drupal.org’s documentation, but might need to keep up with other relevant technologies.

When I look around the office, I see a ton of books on my colleagues’ desks. We have a huge library about a wide array of development topics which support Drupal sites, but which are not actually Drupal-specific. Of course there are quite a few Drupal-specific titles around the office, but they are dwarfed by all the "related topics". I think listing such books on Drupal.org might yield more money for the Drupal association than the Drupal-specific books… and help provide more useful information to people working on Drupal-based sites.

Anyway, as regards the "Views" display and content type, of course this might mean a "primary subject" selector, where "Drupal" is the default value and where the Views display would normally only show those books, but people can add to the filtered results by selecting other topics of interest from the select list. This would probably be a new taxonomy with a limited set of values.

Maybe discussing this should be moved to a new "issue", but I wanted to put these thoughts out there for initial feedback. If we expanded into not-actual-Drupal book listings, my suggestion would be we have even higher standards for such non-Drupal books. They really should be "ideal" for learning the companion technologies for use with Drupal (not full of examples of use in .Net, Joomla!, etc). And if they are a popular topic, like CSS3 or HTML5, they should be top-rated only (e.g. 4-5 stars on Amazon and nothing lower). To simplify things, they should be published by publishers who also have published Drupal books and given us permission to use book description information on drupal.org (so we don't need to deal with dozens of self-publishers and these permissions issues). Our current list of tech publishers have a ton of interesting, high-quality titles which certainly have high overlap with Drupal topics/interests, so I think it would not be hard to double or triple the current list and provide some good suggestions for people browsing for books. The trick would be keeping it limited enough to really be the "cream of the crop" (e.g. as with selecting non-Drupal-but-of-interest topics for DrupalCon sessions).

Feedback? Ideas?

Need someone with the power to publish the book-listing nodes I've (finally) created. :-)

Happy to help with publishing book listings, if needed.

Thanks for your offer DSquaredB, I just published them :) However we'll need some help with new requests moderation and also with the clean-up of the old books section. Let's use #1836258: Migrate Drupal books from book pages to new book-listing content type for further discussion about this. Current issue is about the guidelines and it's fixed.

Quick note for those who were active in this issue. The books view/content type is now live, issue queue and guidelines are in place. We need someone to take over moderation of book listing requests. If you'd like to do it, please comment in this issue: #1794810: Documenting team leaders for webmasters issue queue components.

The queue is located here: http://drupal.org/project/issues/content?status=Open&component=Books+lis...
Guidelines for book listings: http://drupal.org/node/1691562
Guidelines for reviewers (in progress): http://drupal.org/node/1860526