Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is LaTeX still a good choice for "modern" ebooks? Do folks still want PDFs?
if i don't see a pdf, i don't buy it
I was the same way, but epubs can be quite good now, even for highly formatted technical content.
I earned $160k in passive income from writing non-fiction books
71–80 of 229 posts
Re: I earned $160k in passive income from writing non-fiction books
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Passive income can initially take work to build the income source. Most people consider rent to be passive income, yet people don't just magically own houses, they more often than not work to buy them.
Anyone that thinks renting houses is passive income has never done it. Repairs, collections, advertising, evictions, etc.
But all of this is something you can contract out to an agency for a cut of the rent.
Re: I earned $160k in passive income from writing non-fiction books
#73Re: I earned $160k in passive income from writing non-fiction books
#74> I wake up daily excited to write. When work is a dread, or when something unhappy pops up, some writing will always bring in positive energy into me. I don’t dread writing. In fact, I can’t stop myself from writing! I fear we are built different.
>> I wake up daily excited to write. When work is a dread, or when something unhappy pops up, some writing will always bring in positive energy into me. I don’t dread writing. In fact, I can’t stop myself from writing!
>I fear we are built different.
Isaac Asimov was like Greg Lim:
>[T]he only thing about myself that I consider to be severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment is my compulsion to write ... That means that my idea of a pleasant time is to go up to my attic, sit at my electric typewriter (as I am doing right now), and bang away, watching the words take shape like magic before my eyes.
Re: I earned $160k in passive income from writing non-fiction books
#75Re: I earned $160k in passive income from writing non-fiction books
#76> I wake up daily excited to write. When work is a dread, or when something unhappy pops up, some writing will always bring in positive energy into me. I don’t dread writing. In fact, I can’t stop myself from writing! I fear we are built different.
See also where Brandon Sanderson's (an author) guilty pleasure and stress reliever is writing more (in the form of things he wasn't intending to write)
That dude is a machine. He wrote 4 secret novels during the pandemic on top of several regular ones.
Re: I earned $160k in passive income from writing non-fiction books
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it even possible to write a completely objective book about history?
Not a good one. Objective history book would be a timeline. To add another thing interesting (eg cause and effect) is to make decisions and introduce bias.
> Objective history book would be ... decisions and... bias
No, not necessarily. From the events you go to the chains of events, the clusters, the trends, the teachings etc.
Similarly to experimental science, where you go from the protocols ("this happened there then") to the "laws".
The role of «decisions and bias» could be limited, with some similar quantitative, and maybe collaborative (aggregation of multi-agent contribution) approach that ranked the outputs through a computed importance.
Re: I earned $160k in passive income from writing non-fiction books
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a good one. Objective history book would be a timeline. To add another thing interesting (eg cause and effect) is to make decisions and introduce bias.
Even a timeline would be subjective as the author would have to chose what to include.
youve completely lost sight of the forest. there are little granules of subjectivity like the ones you nitpick about and there are huge boulders of subjective nonsense that leave you with a giant bump on your head -- the kind that are caused by dogma like race/gender politics, religion, war etc. the absence of these is what is desperately needed. to wave away the boulders because of the granules is idiotic. ive read books that looked at war objectively, excised moral dogma from religion and omitted race/gender crusading entirely and its very good.
Re: I earned $160k in passive income from writing non-fiction books
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes they are built different: one person has no struggles writing and actively loves it, cannot stop doing it; the other finds it effortful and painful. Those two people will have vastly different experiences writing the book. The former will gain energy and feel great, the latter will feel pressured and depressed. We are not all the same, we are all built different, don’t ignore this reality
That doesn't invalidate GP's comment. Even if you struggle, having a little commitment every day helps building habits and actually relieves the struggle (because a habit creates familiarity and ease). The "we're all different" part plays a role in how long it takes to adapt and bind to this new/building habit.
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Re: I earned $160k in passive income from writing non-fiction books
#80Is anyone able to suggest software for writing technical books?
org-mode, if you don’t mind using emacs.
I recently had to print some of my notes - already in Org mode - for a meeting. After going through numerous options including reformatting in LibreOffice, pandoc, HTML, etc etc I discovered that org mode can export the documents to PDFs that look better than anything else.
Unfortunately, I don't have the config options that I used any more! I changed some fonts and drastically reduced the margins. And some places in which underscores were used had to be escaped as the PDF export interpreted underscores as being subscript.