The catalogue
An empty shelf is best looked at squarely. Here is what will stand on it, and on what conditions.
The place of the first volume
No book is published to date, and that count is recalculated at every release: the day it changes, a volume genuinely exists.
Nothing is announced here, no title, no subject, no date. A catalogue that promises is a catalogue you reread six months later to find out it was wrong.
What a book from this house will be
Each volume is a complete textbook on one subject: the course in its own order, the exercises that go with it, the worked answers to those exercises, and the layout that makes all of it readable. Fifty pages at the very least, because below that a full progression does not hold together.
The content will be under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence: reusable, translatable, printable, sellable even, on the single condition that ODERSA is credited. The editorial design stays with the association. The licence page draws the line precisely.
Every volume will appear in all the languages built on the same day, to read online and to download. It will carry its colophon, its verification date and its caveat about mistakes, in each of its languages.
The vocabulary of this house
Seven words recur across this site. Here they are defined once, so that they do not come to mean something else elsewhere.
- Book
- A complete textbook, fifty pages at the very least, with its progression, its exercises and their worked answers. A shorter document is a worksheet, and it does not enter the catalogue.
- Dedicated project
- The people and the time assigned to one single book, from the first chapter to release. A project never works on two books at once.
- Crossed checking
- The full reading of a text by someone who did not write it. It is an obligation, for every language published, and it bears on substance before style.
- Colophon
- The making record printed in the book: who, when, with what, under which licence, and the caveat about mistakes. At the foot of every page on this site, the colophon says the same about the site itself.
- Leaf
- One page of the work. The foot of this site carries its rank and the total, both counted at build time: it is a book folio, applied to a website.
- CC BY 4.0
- The Creative Commons Attribution licence, version 4.0 international. It allows copying, translating, adapting and selling, on the condition that the author is credited. It is irrevocable.
- Editorial design
- The layout, the grid, the typography and the visual identity. It remains the property of ODERSA, all rights reserved, and it is the single exception to everything else being open here.
How a book enters the catalogue
Six gates, and each one can refuse. A book that fails at any of them does not appear.
- The decision
The association opens one title, and only one. A subject already covered by a complete, openly licensed work is not opened. - The writing
The course, the exercises and the answers, by one hand, all the way to the end of the contents. Fifty pages at the very least. - The illustrations
Every image is openly licensed, its licence checked at its source page, and the image itself is looked at before it is adopted. - The crossed check
A full reading by somebody else, in every language. The reader works the exercises again. - The colophon
Who, when, with what, under which licence, plus the caveat about mistakes and the address for reporting them. - The deposit
One content file enters the repository, and the catalogue, the counters, the plan and the open data all rebuild themselves. Nobody copies a number by hand.
Filtering by language and by subject will appear the day it has something to filter. Building a search over an empty shelf would be one more piece of furniture to maintain, with nothing to find inside it.