<DrumBeat: July 17, 2007 The Oil Drum Peak Oil Booklet - Chapter 2: Is This a False Alarm?>

61 comments on Peak Oil Booklet - Introduction and Chapter 1 - What Is Peak Oil?

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cultural_sublimation on July 17, 2007 - 4:56pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Hi Gail,

Kudos for the article. I'm looking forward to the rest of your series!

As for self-publishing, I would take a look at http://www.lulu.com/ Lots of people swear by them, and their services do seem pretty straightforward.

You can do it pretty cheap if you take care of all the typesetting + design yourself. I would recommend using a document processing system like LaTeX: it takes care of most of the hard typesetting decisions, and the results are professional in quality. Also, stay away from Excel if you want print-quality graphs (sadly, most graphs published here in the Oil Drum look cheap and amateurish because Excel makes such a terrible job). It is worth learning Gnuplot — and especially Asymptote — if you want beautiful professional graphs and illustrations:

http://www.gnuplot.info/
http://asymptote.sf.net/

(All of the above are Free Software!)

Here is also a quick link to Lulu's book cost calculator:
(as I said they are very straightforward)

http://www.lulu.com/includes/calc_book_inc.php

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Gail the Actuary on July 17, 2007 - 6:58pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Thanks for your ideas.

I had found the Lulu site myself. Its good to hear that others like their services. Their web site seems to be very helpful. My one concern with Lulu was that the retail cost seems to come out a little higher than many would like to pay, $30 or so.

Thanks too for the graphics references. I had already come to the conclusion that Excel is pretty limited for graphics, and asked a question on the Chapter 2 post about better graphing software. When I have had magazine articles published in the past, the publisher always took care of making the nice graphics.

I hadn't thought about LaTeX. My husband uses it a lot. I haven't tried it.

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cm on July 17, 2007 - 7:19pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

There is a word like front end end for LaTeX that really does make it easy.

http://www.lyx.org/

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61 comments on Peak Oil Booklet - Introduction and Chapter 1 - What Is Peak Oil?

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