I got the essential leads for the following links from a kuro5hin article titled “All Systems Go: The Newly Emerging Infrastructure to Support Free Books” posted on Fri Dec 16th, 2005.
Accounting
http://www.gnucash.org
now something to track advertisers and something to track articles.
Advertisers should be tracked with their ad, the dates, the amounts.
Articles shoudl be tracked by published or not, dates, author, payment, etc.
Design Software
Inkscapeis an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.
A Guide to Inkscape by Tavmjong Bah
Scribus is a high-level page layout and design program. It is open source and freely available for Linux (aka Macintosh OSX) and Windows.
There is a wiki setup for leaning Scribus, but it has a terrible user interface. I get lost but it seems to be the only up to date source.
Gimp is a good open source pixel level editor http://www.gimp.org/
Online Books
“The Wikimedia Commons is a project that provides a central repository for free images, music, sound & video clips and, possibly, texts and spoken texts, used in pages of any Wikimedia project.”
I haven’t read the small print at Wikimedia so I can’t say if the content can be used outside of things published on Wikimedia.
“Publish and Sell Worldwide” at Lulu.com. “Lulu is FREE, FAST and EASY No set-up fees. No minimum order. No delay. No catch. Lulu prints and ships each book as it’s bought. The buyer pays the cost — not you. Lulu only makes money if you do.”
The Kuro article says that if you don’t take a profit from the book they won’t take a commission. You could down load it for free or just pay the cost of printing.
“Welcome to Textbook Revolution, the web’s source for free educational materials.”
” The Assayeris the web’s largest catalog of free books, and also collects user-submitted reviews.”