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Another Sky Press Driving Neo-Patronage
avidreader writes "Another Sky Press is making a serious go of the neo-patronage / tip jar model — their tagline is 'Welcome to Another Sky Press. We want people to read our books even if they read them for free — though we'd love it if you bought a copy!' Not only are they putting the entire text of their releases online, but they're selling the dead tree versions at cost plus optional contribution. Their first release is garnering some great reviews - 'Intelligent fiction for the mentally unhinged.' According to their website, there are more projects in the works — everything from a short story anthology to a coloring book by artist Jesse Reno. They've also got interesting essays on why they're doing this and neo-patronage. They're even getting neo-patronage some mainstream attention — the Metro Times calls them '...more punk than the punks at Dischord Records.'"
http://www.anothersky.org.nyud.net:8090/
Click a bit further then the homepage and you'll see: "A PDF version of Click will be available within a few days (for free)."
so would you refuse to read a paper that calls itself The Daily Dispatch because dispatch can mean homicide as well as message?
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
I'm guessing you have never used LaTeX or TeX. I haven't used them extensively, but I have done a few simple things in LaTeX - because it wasn't possible to do what I wanted to do in a standard word processor. It is this exact reason why Knuth created TeX in the first place - to cover everything from proper rendering of math formulas to graphics to abstracted definitions for handling every aspect of the document.
One simple example is that LaTeX handles different types of documents differently. When's the last time your word processor asked you to specify whether you were writing an article or a book and behaved accordingly - based on the different needs of these document types? This is a useful feature.
For example, if you were writing a poem in Word using the default set-up, it will try to capitalize each new sentence. However, capitalization is a very useful feature when I'm writing articles - which is more frequent that poems. Where can you abstract out a content set in Word to change the settings for how the application behaves based on document type? You can do some of the work by creating different templates for formatting - but I am not aware of different modes within Word and it is a major hassle to change all the settings to what makes sense every time you choose to work on a different document type.
I can think of other examples. Anyone that has ever tried to do graphic layout in Word can point to many problems in the application for this kind of work. I've also found the Master Document functionality a bit sloppy too. Many of these issues can be addressed easily by someone competent in LaTeX. I've never used Lyx, but I can imagine a number of circumstances where an easy front-end to LaTeX would be useful.