ELotH WikiBook

There is currently an effort to put this wiki together into a form that can be made available through some sort of publish-on-demand distribution method. Before that can be done, the text needs to be edited and organized.

As part of this overhaul there are several editorial tasks. Obviously the first edition of the book will probably not be thoroughly proofread and edited for stylistic unity.

To further this goal I think that the first useful task would be to make sure that all of the information can be categorized, and therefore would have an intelligible place in the book.

I would like to organize content around the large category pages found on the home page, but much wiki content is only referenced from a deeply burried page.

Win a WikiBook contest

So I'm thinking I'll run some kind of a contest, where the prize of a free copy of the book goes to the winner. Perhaps it'd be another broken link day, with the person to fill in the most links gets a book.. or maybe a scavenger hunt for obscure information in the wiki.

Stay tuned...

Update 06-09-2006

The decision has to be made at some point: what will ultimately end up in the Wikibook?

Update 04-20-2006 (2)

Here's some pictures of the book.. In the grand tradition: The typo on the cover has been fixed which makes my book a rare first edition.

Update 04-20-2006

Uploaded the cycle_book_third_edition.pdf which actually has the advantage of properly interpreting the UTF-8 from the wiki so non-ascii characters don't just show up as garbage... this includes Japanese text and and "smart quotes". Otherwise its the same exact text from the second edition. This version may actually be worth going with for a while. So next I might make a wizbits/elamenstar episode guide. Also I'm considering building a giant 3 tome complete copy of the wiki. {Edit: this is also the version available for purchase}

Update 04-18-2006

Uploaded the second edition. This is now what you'd get if you bought it at the online store. It has the entry for elements, as well as including earth, wind, fire, water entries. Still didn't work in the Cerulean Citadel as nothing directly (or even indirectly) references it in the books, which is ashame. Also I now start the book with the noob guide, which seems friendlier than starting with the elemenstor cycle entry. Really one could write a book specific introduction. Anyway, if anybody wants me to upload the word doc that I used to generate the PDF so they can play the role of editor, then I'd be more than happy. As always, this document can change at any time so if you purchase it now you could be getting the out of date version.

Update 04-17-2006 (notes on version 2.0)

Probably an effort should be made to reference the "elemenstor introduction" text from this wiki to begin the book. also, it is interesting that just using all the entries from the books, all the pages that they reference, and all the pages that they reference, we don't pick up the entry for the cerulean citadel or most of the elements.

Update 04-17-2006

Ok.. so I've made a "first draft" available for purchase on my cafepress store.

It's the full text from the pages listed under elemental cycle on the mindless automaton page.

http://www.cafepress.com/happyworldland.54766322

Absolutely nothing fancy has been done in terms of formatting, editor, or spell checking, and there's no title page or any other niceties in the book itself, although there is a table of contents.

I've next day ordered one for myself that should arrive by the end of the week so I can check it out... Presumably version 2.0 will be better.

Just as a disclaimer, I make a dollar for every one of these that somebody buys that I will not be donating to charity (the rest of the money goes to cafepress).

Also.. if you would like the book in PDF version it can be downloaded here: http://elothtes.pbwiki.com/f/elothtes_book_01.pdf

Update 04-11-2006

So for the first volume of the book I've decided it would be cool to make it about the Elemenstor Cycle proper. I figure that the entries for the 13 books could begin the tome, then after that there can be an "appendix" which would be most of the book and would define everything linked to by those pages, and everything that those pages link to (2 degrees from the book). I compiled that list of links and made sure all of those pages have headings, then I wrote a program that will collect those links and render them into HTML. Looks like it's about 300 8x11 single sided pages if I printed it from Mozilla. Hopefully that'd be a good length for the first volume. Now that I have the text selected.. anybody know a good way to lay that out? I tried opening the html file in microsoft word and it choked.. publisher was able to render it, but it treated the whole thing as an incredibly long page.

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