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There is a niche for "small"ish books of about 100 pages that can be useful for

• survey books
  • "what is there to know about X"
  • "what's new in X since Y event/version/year"
• deep dive into a niche topic
  • "asyncio in python and how it is used in web applications"
  • "asyncio in python and how it can be used in non-web settings"

These small books should also be formatted for easy consumption over phone/tablet screen.

Why would this be a book vs a blog post?

There are many blog posts that have lives longer than published books, papers and manuscripts. I think thinking of a book forces a certain structure on the author and the content. Secondly, even a self-published book (a downloadable PDF) obtains the sheen a "product" vs writing, which some might desire.

Some exampled I can think of in this genre:

• The little book of deep learning [pdf] by François Fleuret - professor of computer science at the University of Geneva, Switzerland; Apr 2023. This is actually 156 pages including a full index, bibliography etc... formatted for reading on a phone screen. git clone https://fleuret.org/git/littlebook
• Hundred-Page Machine Learning book by Andriy Burkov on LeanPub.

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