the sitemap for press.rebus.community is empty. Is that intended? In addition to SEO, it would help us out a lot at Unglue.it if “published” books were listed in a sitemap.
Hi @eric There are very few books that are actually “finished” or “published” as of this point, but as that changes, we’ll be sure to make them accessible on the press.rebus.community via the sitemap at the very least. We’re also exploring other ways of distribution and linking as the catalog grows.
Dispensing with the scare quotes, is there any way for me to tell if a book is ready for distribution? I imagine that many textbooks will be continually revised. Will they have be version numbers? Many software projects have documentation that can be distributed as ebooks, and they have explicit versioning. This is also a widely used practice in books produced with TeX.
Hi @eric Yes, Rebus-supported textbooks will have long lives and be continually updated, and will likely follow something like the OpenStax model for tracking versions. Major revisions will require a new edition.
We’re working on a strategy for this, in partnership with Pressbooks, the platform we use to build books.
We are also part of some conversations around metadata for Web books. (Numerous authors and multiple editions are just a few of the issues we’d like to find good solutions for.)
Currently this is the first book to be ready for distribution this fall and we have a few other hopefuls in the wings. We will be using it and any others as test cases to work out these logistics.
So…stay tuned?
That reminds me that Hugh mentioned something he was doing with w3c? and I was supposed to go sign up for it’s list? and I didn’t. What is OpenStax doing?
@eric Regarding the sitemap, we’re checking in with our developer who manages the Pressbooks infrastructure, but as Liz mentioned, it should display books as they are “published.”
There should also be a way to tell if a book is ready for distribution, and an intelligent way to signal versions and revisions. We’re working on this with Pressbooks!
Rebus is involved with the W3C publishing working group - you can find out more about it here: https://www.w3.org/TR/pwp/. The OpenStax revisions process have been discussed in some of previous Office Hours sessions, you can take a look here: https://about.rebus.community/2017/08/july-office-hours-recap-video-updating-open-textbooks/