Archive

• Patterns, Predictions, and Actions by Moritz Hardt and Benjamin Recht; PDF, problem sets.
• Learning Theory from First Principles by Francis Bach.
• Foundations of Machine Learning by Mehryar Mohri.
• Understanding Machine Learning: From Theory to Algorithms by  Shai Shalev-Shwartz and Shai Ben-David

Via Four years of running a SaaS in a competitive market - Max Rozen

• The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
• Deploy Empathy by Michele Hansen
• Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra
• The SaaS Playbook by Rob Walling

Via Merri Cronk of Frannet

• The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber (on kindle)
• Built to Sell by John Warrillow

The episode of "How I Write" podcast is here - Sam Parr: Copywriting... What You Need to Know

I heard this episode while biking 10.7 miles on my bike.

People mentioned:

• Dharmesh Shah
• Scott Galloway
• Robert Caro
• Felix Dennis
• Gregory David Roberts
• Ben Franklin
• Hunter S. Thompson
• Neil Gaiman
• Neil Armstrong
• James Madison
• Thomas Jefferson
• Harry Dry -- Learn Great Copywriting in 76 minutes
  • Kaplan's law of words -- any words that aren't working for you, are working against you.

Books mentioned:

• American Kingpin
• How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis
• The Elements of Eloquence by
• Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
• The Great Gatsby

Websites and Products mentioned:

• The Hustle

Concepts and Ideas:

• AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action)
• Copy work
• Merism
• Antithesis

Key takeaways:

1. The headline is VERY important. It should be attention grabbing, and the hook should be the beginning of a slope that keeps the attention of the user going down the length of the piece - advert, article, book, ... If you nail the headline, you will nail the rest of it.

The following summary was generated by Clade from the text transcript of the video

Key topics discussed:

• Writing viral articles and effective copy
• Building email newsletters and media businesses
• Reading habits and favorite books
• Techniques for memorable writing and phrasing
• Company vision and branding
• The importance of speed and boldness in business

Key insights:

• Focus on email subscribers as a core metric for media businesses
• Use "forgotten text" like thank you pages to enhance branding
• Study early versions of successful company websites for inspiration
• Employ techniques like antithesis and merism for memorable phrasing
• Read history books for entertainment and business books for enrichment
• Define what your company stands for and against in your vision
• Move fast and create stakes to build momentum in new projects
• Written words have power to shape institutions and societies

Phone formatted PDFs are a great option to provide reading material and courses in.

The Little Book of Deep Learning is where I first encountered "Phone formatted book". The LaTeX layout is in this git repository.

k2pdfopt  optimizes PDF/DJVU files for mobile e-readers (e.g. the Kindle) and smartphones via 🐥svat

Some links from Archive.org

• Panchatantra in Karnataka Sculptures by Channabasappa Patil S.
• Lilavati's daughers, the women scientists of India.
• The Kautilya Arthashastra - part I by R P Kangle in sanskrit.
• Kautilya arthashasra - part II by R P Kangle (PDF)
• Lord Siva And His Worship : Sri Swami Sivananda : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
• ದುರ್ಗಸಿಂಹ ಕವಿಯ ಕರ್ನಾಟಕ ಪಂಚತಂತ್ರಂ : Gundmi Chandrashekara Aithal : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
• Gramadevatas A Study Of The Feminine Divine In Bangalore Rural District 16th To 19th A D : Gomathi, Manohar (2012) from the Internet Archive.

Authors

• Kalidasa
• Abhinavagupta
• Arthashastra of Kautilya -- read R P Kangle's edition
• Machiavelli -- Discourses on Livy, the Prince
• Marcel Proust -- In search of lost time
• Shakespere

History

• The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

Recommendations:

• _sh4 book recco

See also: 100-page-book

Lulu specific notes

• Using LaTex to publish a novel on Lulu.

Fixing Embedded fonts error

When you are trying to publish a book via Lulu.com, you might encounter "embed fonts" error. This is the workaround I found on the web that uses ghostscript:

gs -dSAFER -dNOPLATFONTS -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
 -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer \
 -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dMaxSubsetPct=100 -dSubsetFonts=true \
 -dEmbedAllFonts=true -sOutputFile=new.pdf -f old.pdf

See also: Embed fonts in a PDF with pdflatex which shows a simpler technique:

pdf2ps doc.pdf
ps2pdf13 -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress doc.ps doc2.pdf

However, the resulting PDF looks fuzzier than the original one.

Resizing all pages of a PDF to a common size

This can happen if you are combining multiple PDF documents (say using pdftk) to make a compendium. You can resize all the pages to be of the same size using ghostscript -- source:

gs -o /path/to/resized.pdf
   -sDEVICE=pdfwrite
   -dPDFFitPage
   -r300x300
   -g2550x3300
   /path/to/original.pdf

Cropping PDFs

• PDFCrop

Self publishing tools

• The Tools I Use to Write Books | Hacker News

• lise-henry/crowbook: Converts books written in Markdown to HTML, LaTeX/PDF and EPUB
• softcover/softcover: CLI for book generation, building, and publishing to softcover.io

Manning

• Writing a Technical Book for Manning | Tune The Web

Libraries

• PrinceXML
• Speedata Publisher to generate reports. XML->PDF. Uses LuaTeX. AGPL/Commercial license.
• PreTeXt An authoring and publishing system for authors of textbooks, research articles, and monographs, especially in STEM disciplines. The best of DocBook, LaTeX, and HTML. Outputs: print, PDF, web, EPUB, Jupyter Notebooks, braille,. github; XML based syntax.

Web publishing

• HTMLBook "an HTML replacement to Docbook"
• Bookiza Abelone "The book reification framework for the web." See example.
• ONCE — Writebook
• Printing the web, part 2: HTML and CSS for printing books using modern print CSS and PrinceXML.

Zines

• How to write zines with simple tools - Julia Evans

Book covers

• The 78 Best Book Covers of 2019 | Literary Hub

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See also: pandoc