Book Publishing with the Wolfram Language

This talk is going to be on publishing with Wolfram Language. So if you thought you were at a different talk, it's okay, you can go. But I'm excited that you guys are all here and I'm just excited to get into this topic and kind of share some options that we have. I know all you guys are lovers and users of the Wolfram language, so this is kind of the next step. How do you take what you know, what you like to do with the Wolfram language and share that with somebody else in the form of a published work? So this is kind of a little overview of where our talk is going to go. Today. I'll give a little introduction to Wolfram Media, what we do, what we're about. I'll show you some of our past projects and we'll talk about opportunities to support all of you guys as authors. And then we'll talk about some formats that we have available for publishing, text centered content, things that you make with Wolfram Language. And then the end, the reason why this is called a workshop, we'll do a little interactive demonstration of Wolfram Book Tools, which is our palette for author authoring stuff in the Wolfram language. So if you did bring your laptop, you'll be welcome to get it out for that end part, that workshop part. If not, you can just kind of follow along with me on the screen here and always be able to try these things out later on. So first off, I'll start with introductions. My name is Paige Bremner. I'm the managing editor for Wolfram Media. So if you've ever contacted us about any type of book project or authoring experience, you may have got in touch with me in the past. This is Tray and Trey and you can say hi. He's our publishing assistant. So he's been around about a year now. So you might have interacted with him or if you are going to be working on a project with us in the future, you might interact with him in the future. Kind of the third full time member of our team. His name is Todd Akers. He's not here today. He lives out in California, but he's our production specialist and he does a lot of very fancy things with getting our content to look really great in print and also for some online formats. So this is kind of our brief overview of what Wolfram Media is. Down there at the bottom of the screen you'll see kind of some thumbnails of books that we have published. All of these books are available for sale. Just a quick sales pitch if anyone is interested in them, you can get 25% off at the conference. But yeah. So Wolfram Media is the publishing arm of the Wolfram Group, and we work on publishing books. We do ebooks, print books, and kind of experimenting with some new forms of ebooks that we'll get into a little bit later on. We also do support authors who work with other publishers, so we'll talk about that, too. If you do want to know just a little bit more about what Wolfram Media is and what we do, you can go to our site. It'll look like this, and you'll see our past projects there and also some materials for contacting us. And later on I'll be showing you. There's also that palette that I was talking about for authoring books. It's called Wolfram Book Tools. So you can download that from our site and we'll get to that later on. Okay, so the next couple of slides I have are going to be examples of projects that we have done in the past. So I'll just talk a little bit about each one. This is Introduction to Machine Learning by Essienne Bernard. We published this in 2021. We're really proud of it and excited for it. Just from a publishing side of things, I'll kind of tell you just some unique publishing notes for each of our books. But this one we first published as a print on demand title, which is something that's kind of newer to the publishing world. And what that means is we only. We work with a service, in this case Ingram, and they only print a book when someone orders a book. So it's a. It's kind of the way that the publishing world is slowly starting to move. Like, we don't invest in a huge amount of stock. So that can be an option for, like, say you have a more niche audience for your book. It doesn't make sense for us to print 10,000 of them or something like that. So that's an option that's available. That is how we started out with this book. Now being the book kind of picked up in popularity. We do also have a traditional print run, but that's an option for books. These two books. How many of you guys have read either one of these? Anyone? Okay, a couple. Yeah. These books are pretty popular. Hands on Start to Wolfram Mathematica and Hands on Start to Wolfram Alpha. If you haven't checked them out, I'd recommend them. They're fairly basic level. They're great for introducing either young students or even adults to these Two programs. And they kind of do what they say they do their Hands on Start. They take you step by step through just a couple of basic things in Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, respectively. So Hands on Start to Mathematica is in its third edition, so it's been pretty popular, one of our best sellers. And it definitely is a great tool for just showing the basic functionality of Wolfram language. And the third edition added a few newer things, things that are newer to the language, like image processing, machine learning. So we're keeping that up to date then. Hands on search of WolframAlpha is intended mostly for a younger audience. If you were at Steven's keynote, you heard him talk about how WolframAlpha Notebook Edition is kind of that bridge between WolframAlpha and the Wolfram language. So this book is very helpful to learn how to use Wolfram Alpha Notebook Edition. And it's kind of geared towards like an eighth grade, maybe reading level. So it's a. It's a great book for. For people that are getting started. Introduction to Statistics. This one's by Juan Klopper. He is actually a doctor in South Africa, so he uses a lot of examples of statistics from medicine, which is super cool. And he uses this class to teach his students, which I think is a very popular option with authors. Like maybe you've been working on something that you find very helpful. I know a lot of people here are professors, so that is pretty common that our authors will work on something that can be used as a resource for their class. This book is also through Ingram Lightning Source, which is our print on demand option that I was talking about earlier. And this one just stayed there. And that's perfectly fine. He sells, you know, a respectable number of copies that way and we don't have to worry about, you know, that huge investment that could possibly cause the project to be very expensive of having a whole print run. This book is called Mastering the Black Box of Statistics and Research Design. This one is by Bruce Schneider, and this one is pretty unique. We'll talk a little bit more about this format later on. But it is actually just a zip file of notebooks sold as an ebook on our store. So it has the benefit of keeping all the functionality of Mathematica right there in the published book. So you don't have to have a static print document or a static PDF. It actually has a lot of functionality built into it. So we'll talk a little bit more about that format later on. But that's an option that's becoming more and more popular for published materials, if you will. We're calling it an ebook, but it's definitely kind of a new style of ebook. This is Steven's box set which was available for sale earlier today. And if you missed that event, you can come still see me and we can get you a copy. It is not available on Amazon yet. It will be very shortly, like mid November. It will be available on Amazon, but if you want it right now, you can only get it through me. This one contains his A New Kind of Science which is published 20 years ago, his physics project which was published about two years ago in 2020, and a brand new book called 20 Years of a New Kind of Science. That book's kind of about his experience writing the original book. So that was pretty interesting to me being I'm interested in publishing. There's also material on kind of where the research from A New Kind of Science has gone since then. So that's pretty interesting. And then the book concludes with a gallery of art that has been inspired by A New Kind of Science and by cellular automata. And it came out very nice in print. So I would definitely recommend checking that out. This book is called Metamathematics. It's another one by Stephen and it's coming out later this year. It has a lot of really nice full color graphics in it. I think you probably heard him mention it in his keynote last night. Another one I would definitely keep an eye out for. You can keep an eye on his blog or just other Wolfram sites to see exactly when this is coming out, but I anticipate it will be in December. This project is Jerry Thomas's book. I see you in the audience. Hi. We're really excited about this one. This is another example of Jerry worked on this project for his students that he teaches. So he converted the materials that he was already using for his class and kind of refined them and turned them into something that his students could use. And this one is only available as a Kindle book, which is another way to kind of keep that cost down. Because once again, for, for some of these books the audience is a little smaller, which is totally fine. And we just find the way to not sink too much into like a full on print run if that's not going to be the most useful form to the audience anyways and make it available to, to the students who are interested in it. Okay. The next part of the presentation is kind of going to be about what opportunities we have to support authors. So there's kind of. I always describe it as three modes of publishing and author support that we at Wolfram Media offer. The first one is we support you guys while you work with another publisher. And the second one would be we support you while you add an ebook that you kind of produce on your own to our store. That would be kind of like the Bruce Schneider project I showed earlier. And the third one is that we do act as a full service publisher, which would be more like what we've done with Jerry Thomas and with Etienne Bernard's book. So in terms of working with other publishers, I just have some images of logos of other publishers who have published books about Mathematica or Wolfram language on the screen. And I would bet that everyone in here probably recognizes at least one of those logos from, from books that they've used or maybe even had to use in school in the past. But so all of these well known respected publishers are publishing content about Wolfram language and we fully support that. So there is no qualms about us not wanting you to publish with anyone else or anything like that. We're very supportive of you working with other publishers if you're working with another publisher. This is kind of a list of what kind of support we can provide to you. So the first thing is that we assist with pagination of notebook content. So maybe if you're working with Elsevier or Springer, they're not too familiar with Mathematica, but we have a lot of experience with taking things out of Mathematica and making them look nice in print. So if they're having any trouble with that, if you're having any trouble with that, we're happy to help with that. The other thing, next thing is answering code related questions. If you're writing a book, chances are that you are pretty confident in your abilities and your coding. But everybody occasionally runs into that weird bug or that issue that they're just not sure why it's not working out. So you can contact me. I will tell you I have no idea. I'm not a programmer. But I can put you in touch with the developer within Wolfram who worked on that, worked on building that area and get you the answers to the questions that you need. The next is the next two are kind of like light marketing help for your book. We can provide a listing of your book on our Wolfram Book site, which is a curated site of, to the best of our ability, all the books about Wolfram language, no matter who published them. So we'll add your book there. And that's a place where hopefully Some of you guys have already visited, but if not, I would very much recommend that's a place where people who are interested in the Wolfram language can go to find books about all sorts of topics. And we can also mention your new book on one of our blog posts, if you've ever read the Wolfram blog. We try to do a new books post a couple times a year, and we highlight some of the new books about Wolfram language that have been published by outside publishers. So the. Some of the benefits of working with another publisher, number one, is that all the. All the support I just described is provided to you at no extra cost. You don't have to pay us for any of that. We're happy to do it for you. It's beneficial to us to get the content out there from other publishers. So we're excited about that. The other thing is you're free to negotiate your contract and your royalties with the publisher as you see fit. We would never try to get involved with that. So whatever deal you want to work out with the publisher is great. And then the last bullet point I have up here, this is kind of a benefit as compared to publishing yourself. You get the benefit of their editorial support and your publisher's distribution resources. So that's kind of hard to go it alone. I wouldn't recommend that anyone tries to publish a book without an editor especially. And then the distribution can be really helpful, too. So those are kind of benefits that you get. I do have a little caveat at the bottom there. If you're selling your book for, like, economic profit, we do normally require that you have an enterprise license, but you should talk to your sales rep about that. Next is kind of the second mode of publishing that I talked about. That's adding your ebooks to the Wolfram Store. That would be kind of similar to the Bruce Schneider example that I showed earlier. So basically, what this method of publishing is is you write all of your content in notebooks. Oftentimes authors use one notebook per chapter. So you'd have like a whole file folder full of notebooks that is your book, zip it together in a zip file and then send them to us. What we do is add a registration screen. So that means that once it's on the store, a user buys it and gets a code to register it. So that's like making sure that you do get some profit from your project. It's not like an airtight DRM system. Sophisticated coders can find their way around it. And for a lot of reasons, we haven't instituted any type of airtight DRM system in Wolfram language because we value its usability and user friendliness so much. But we do add that registration screen so that people can register your book, and then we provide an ISBN, which in the book world, kind of just gives your. It's basically like a UPC code at the grocery store. It makes your book like an official product, and it really helps distributors and wholesalers find your book. Things like that gives it an air of legitimacy in the book world. Yeah, For the ebook, zip file that. Actually, we're about to get to that. But really, it's up to you. That's one of the nicest features about this. We will negotiate with you, but in the end, we normally let the author completely select that price on their own. We've had books for $10. We've had books for $65. So you kind of would determine what is the value to your users, what are people willing to pay, how much do you want to charge them for it, that type of thing. And that's another benefit of this system, is we really do. I have, like, choose the list price up here, but we really do leave that up to you, so you can pick what works best for your project. So these are kind of the other benefits for the authors of publishing a zip file of Notebooks as an ebook on our store. A benefit is that you have complete control over how it's formatted, what quality it is. Like I said earlier, I would not recommend that anyone publish a book without an editor. Even if you're a fantastic writer, every piece of writing can benefit from editing. So in this format of publishing, we would not serve as your editor, but you're welcome to hire any freelance editor, friend, editor, whatever you have going on that would work well for your project. The other great benefit of this is maximum control over your timeline. And this can be a really big deal for authors. Sometimes. I have people come up to me sometimes and be like, I have this great book. I have all the content done. Let's get it published. But I then have to take it through the process of getting approved by my bosses. And then it has to sit in our pipeline and wait for when we actually have the production resources to work on it, which can sometimes be a while if Steven's working on five new books in a row. So it's not that I don't want to work on your project, but a lot of times, if it's really important to you, hey, I need my book ready by next semester for my class this can be a really great option for you because you control how fast it gets done. And then all that we're doing is we're taking about two weeks to add it to our store. So that's, that's a great benefit for authors. A lot of times there's also these benefits for the audience of you doing your book this way as again, this is about adding your book to our store as a zip file of notebooks. So one of the greatest benefits from the audience is obviously that the dynamic content is in print. That all has to get kind of flattened out and it just looks like how it looks like. And nobody can click any of the buttons. Of course with the notebooks you can manipulate dynamics. You can. Our signing phase does make it so that a user can't change the code in your notebook, but they can always copy and paste it into their own notebook, modify it as they want. And that's a lot more useful than maybe just a static piece of text on a printed page. You can also add things like external linking, custom navigation. Bruce Schneider actually worked into his. It's. It's kind of like a whole. It pops up like three windows at once. I'll show you in a little bit. But it has actually where you can submit your homework module through the, the little application that he built. So anything that you can dream and that you can program, because again I'm not a programmer, is available to you in that format. And then another benefit is that it can be sold a lot more cost effectively. You don't have to consider, oh, how much printed cost do I have to recover? And set your list price. That way you can kind of set your list price just based on what do I think this is worth to my audience? So next I'm going to show just a couple of examples of what that can look like because like I said, there are a lot of different versions of how these ebooks can look. This is probably the simplest version. It's something we've started doing kind of recently. This one is for hands on start to Mathematica. But what it is is the notebooks are all bundled together in a zip and when you download them they have this nice navigational header up here where you can click to the next chapter using those navigational arrows, these guys right here. And also there's this drop down menu if you want to like jump to chapter 22 you can just click there. These just scroll like a normal notebook and it just looks pretty nice. It has nice formatting applied. Very simple to set up Next slide here. This is just a screenshot of Bruce Schneider's book. Like I said, it kind of. It's a more complex setup, but it could be much more useful to your readers, perhaps depending on the content that you're working with. But it does pop up with like all these pre sized Windows options to go to, you know, homework modules or book chapters or whatever the case may be. You get deeper into this. He has like his figures in a separate section and everything like that. So just to show that it really is up to you kind of what format this would take. And there's a lot more options than maybe you would find working with a printed book. Next, I'm going to just briefly touch on interactive courses. It's kind of a natural jump. If you've prepared Wolfram language content as a book, especially if you're using it as course material, you might think, hey, it would be really helpful if I actually had like an online class to go with this. So if you have considered that maybe. Have any of you guys checked out anything from Wolfrom you yet? Okay, so Wolfram youm is separate from Wolfram Media, but we do work on some of the same content sometimes. So they offer a couple of modalities to create a course. This one here that I have a screenshot of, it's called Introduction to Mathematica For Teacher, for students and teachers. And it's just a list of videos. So it's just kind of a playlist. You go through, there's someone kind of instructing you. There's also. I passed it already. This one that I showed, it kind of has more, more features to it. There's this notebook on the side that has like the content that might be in the book. It has the scratch pad on the bottom so you can follow along and then the video in the middle and the navigation here on the left. So they have a couple different types of courses that are available. And if you are interested in that, I'll direct you to talk to our Wolf and youm team so you can contact them at wolfram-uwolfram.com these slides will be distributed online, so you don't have to worry about writing that down. But yeah, that is a natural jump for some of our authors, I believe. Wolfram is currently working on an online course for Etienne's Introduction to Machine Learning material. So that should be available before too long. And that's an option for authors as well. Okay, next we are going to jump into our interactive demonstration, kind of showing the tools that we have available if you are interested in authoring something using Wolfram language. So if you have your laptops with you, go ahead and get them out if you'd like to follow along. And the first thing I'll have you do is go to our website. It's up there on the screen, wolfram-media.com and you'll see this little Author Resources tab. Click on that and then the big orange button. Download Wolfram Book Tools. Go ahead and click on that and start the download. I'll give you a couple minutes if anyone is going to follow along. So what that'll download is it is a palette that can be used. It has a couple of tools that I'll get into describing that are helpful for laying out your book. Basically its main feature is it takes the guesswork out of how should I format different sections of my book? And allows you to just focus on the content. So it's kind of a pre made template for how you can format your book content. And then you always do have the option to modify it in any way that you want if you don't like the colors or the style or anything like that. Okay, so once you've downloaded it, if you open that downloaded file, you'll get this little guy. It's just a tiny window that pops up with one button on it. It says Install Update. Go ahead and click on that. Then there will be a message from Mathematica that says the installation requires you to restart Mathematica. Go ahead and do that and just make sure you obviously save any Mathematica content. If anyone is following along, just let me know if I'm going too fast. Otherwise I'll just assume maybe we're gonna try this later. Okay, so once you've done that, you will see in your Palettes menu which will be kind of like up on your top navigation bar for Mathematica. You'll see kind of in alphabetical order. You'll see Wolfram Book Tools has appeared in your palette. So go ahead and click that. And what you'll see is this thing that I have here on the right, open up. So it has those two black buttons at the top and a couple other white options. This is the Wolfram Book Tools palette. And we'll kind of spend the rest of our time describing what it does and how to use it. So the very first thing I'd say you should do, if you've never used it before, go ahead and click on new template. And that is going to open up a notebook that looks like this. So as the name suggests this is a template. It shows what you could have as the layout of your book. If you've read Steven's elementary intro, you might recognize kind of some of the formatting it is based off of that. And like he was saying at his keynote last night, it would be really great if we had other authors writing about different areas of Wolfram's functionality in this format. So that's why we're making this available to everyone. Okay. So in that template there are examples of pre formatted styles including section subsection, sub subsection, text code, text input, output, and we also have options for numbered items and just regular bullet pointed items. So you can kind of see that if you scroll through the template yourself, they're pretty self explanatory. Those are type, those are the types of cells that will be the bulk of your content that'll make up the majority of your chapter. Next, if you go to the bottom of the template, you'll see some exercises that are some, sorry, not exercises, some section types that are meant as end matter for your chapters. So those will be vocabulary exercises, question and answer, tech notes, and more to explore. These aren't required. If you don't want to use them in your book or your content doesn't lend itself to them, that's totally fine. But they're there and available to you. And a lot of times our authors do find that they're useful to their readers, especially exercises. Normally, if you're writing a book about Wolfram language, it's that you're trying to explain how to use Wolfram language to do something. So including those exercises gives your readers like a great chance to practice what you've just taught them in the chapter. Like I said, if you're interested in finding an example of maybe how some of these sections were used, if you're like, hmm, how would a Q and A work? You can check out Steven's Elementary Intro to Wolfram Language. It's available in print but also free online. So if you'd like to see kind of how he used some of those sections, you can check that out. Okay, the next thing that I would have you do with the palette after you've checked out the template is in this light gray area that I've circled in red at the bottom there's something that says set draft chapter directory. And this will just, this is like a one time setup thing that makes it easier to use in the future. So you can either pick, go ahead and click on that and then pick the directory where you have your Book content stored. Or if you haven't started yet, just start a new directory. In my example here, I named it my book project. But name it whatever works for you. And that will be where all your chapters are stored. You will have to give Mathematica access to that directory. So go ahead and click yes. Okay, so that's kind of the one time setup. You'll be done with that after that, no need to do it again until your next book project. But for one project that you only have to do that once, the next thing that you would do is go ahead and click New chapter at the top of that palette and this is where we'll really start actually writing content. So the little pop up that's pretty self explanatory comes up chapter number. If you're starting with your first chapter, leave that as one and click ok. If you're working on chapter five, but five or whatever the case may be. And then you'll get a new notebook that looks like this. It will just say chapter with whatever number you select it and have those four X's there. So these two cells are a section style cell, which is what we use for a chapter title, and a text style cell. And like I said, in this format, each of your chapters will be its own notebook. So you don't have to like tack them all onto each other. You'll start a new notebook for your new chapter. So you can go ahead if you are following along or if you want to try this later. Replace where it says XXX with your first paragraph text and replace chapter with your chapter name. So that number will stay the same here. I put using the Wolfram language as an example and then you just start typing your very first paragraph there in the text area. I think something we've all known from working with Mathematica or really any program is that you should save often so you don't lose any of your work. So there is a Save chapter button on the palette. If you go ahead and click that, it will give you the option within the directory that you already selected to name your file. And you can name it whatever works for you. And then from then on, after you've done that once, you can just use the regular command S to save your file. Okay, the next thing that we'll talk about is the insert drop down menu. That is one of the best features of the palette. It has a lot of options of pre formatted styles for you to use for your book. So that will be in the Doc cell at the top of any of Your Wolfram Book Tools styles notebooks. So you won't find this in a default style notebook, but it will be there in any notebook that you create via the process that we just explained. It has a lot of options for things that you can select. So as an example, we'll start with selecting code text. And if you do that insert and select code text, it will create a code text style cell, which similar to the text style cell has this four X's in there that you can type over. And what goes in a code text style cell is something that we really encourage all of our authors to do. And even if you write your book not using this template, I highly recommend you do this. It is a one line description usually ends in a colon that explains exactly what your code is doing in a very brief amount of words. So that's very helpful to anyone who's flipping through the book and trying to figure out exactly what's going on with your code. Save the lengthy descriptions for a regular text cell. The code text cell is this quick. Here's what's happening with my code. So in the example I just put a very basic. This is how you add numbers with Wolfram language. Next after that you would obviously want to show the code. And that is the reason that you are authoring in a Wolfram notebook rather than doing this in Microsoft Word or whatever the case may be. So you just go ahead and start typing. Because the default style cell in these notebooks, just like in the default notebook, is a input cell. So you don't have to get that from your drop down menu. Just start typing your code. You'll get an input cell and you'll evaluate it the same way you do in any other Wolfram notebook. Shift enter and then your code will be right there mixed in with your text. And then of course, that same basic principle of using that insert drop down menu can be used to insert any of the other style cells that you see here. So what you'll do is get your little horizontal insertion bar between the cells that you want to add the new cell in the location you want to add the new cell and then just click insert and select your cell type. So I'll just explain what a couple of them are and what they look like and kind of the features that they have. So comments all the way at the bottom of the insert menu will give you something that looks like this kind of a tiny picture, but it's this yellow highlighted yellow background cell. These are really. It's kind of a production tool for you it will not stay in, more than likely in your final published version. But here I put as example, need to come back and edit. So if you're working through your content and you're like, oh, I want to revisit this, or oh, I have a question for the author, or I am an author and I have a question for my editor, or whatever the case may be, you can put that in a comment style cell. These will be really easy to identify, obviously, because they're yellow. So you can know to go back later and remove them all once you've dealt with whatever the issue was. Also, from that insert menu, you'll see there's a choice for vocabulary cell. There's two choices. There's vocabulary, two column and three columns. So we'll just touch on that briefly. Two column would be like you have your term and your definition. And three column would be if you find a use for the third column, anything that you want is really fine. But for example, maybe you have a term, a symbolic representation of the term in the second column and then the definition. So there are those two examples and more lines can be added to the vocabulary using that insert menu as well. It'll say insert new vocabulary. So these sections, the vocabulary section actually comes at the end of your chapter. It's like in each chapter. So obviously all the terms there will be in that chapter. We don't really have an automated way to have like a list of all the chapters that term applies in. But that's, that's a great idea. Okay, so next we have exercises. Same thing. You find it in that drop down menu. Exercises with the S will give you the whole exercise section. It'll be a group of three cells. That little styled cell that just says exercises, your first exercise. And then this third one is an exercise input cell. You don't have to use it, but sometimes the author will want to give some input with the exercise. And you can put it there, just type over what's already there. Obviously one plus two plus three is probably not the input you want to give, but you can just type over that. And if you're like, no, I don't want to give the input, because that's the answer to my exercise. If that's more the type of content that you have, you can just go ahead, highlight the cell bracket and delete it. If you don't want it, then exercise singular will add a new exercise. After that, chances are you probably want more than one exercise. So you can use that to add a second exercise without adding a whole Second exercise section Q and A. Tech notes more. That button will add all three of those sections at once. And again, anything you don't want, just go ahead, highlight the cell bracket and click delete. Anything you want to add more items to, you'll see those options on your insert menu too. You can add, you know, one more question, one more answer, one more tech note, etc. You can also use that drop down menu right here towards the bottom to insert a reference section. We normally recommend that authors just do one bibliography at the end for all their references. But if for some reason you think no, it'd be a lot more useful to my readers to do references at the end of every chapter that's available to you. And just go ahead when this cell just kind of explains that we normally use Chicago style, you can use whatever style works for your project or with the publisher you're working with and just remove that informational cell. Okay, there are a couple more things besides just the insert drop down menu on this doc cell that's at the top of every one of your booktool styles notebooks. So we'll explain the rest of those. Now the first one is probably the most useful one. I think it's the little dropdown that says Function name. Once you click it, you'll see there's two choices, link and format. So the way to use this is in a text cell or a code text cell, highlight the name of any built in Wolfram language function and it does need to be spelled exactly the same as we spell it in the Wolfram language and needs to be capitalized. But if you highlight that and click the link button, it will do two things. It will change the format of the word to this kind of sans serif, a little bit darker format that you see down here, which is a visual indicator to the reader of the second thing it just did, which is it created a link to our documentation page. This is really helpful because maybe the point of your book is not to explain what plot is, but maybe there's a reader who's never used plot before. They can click that link and get all the information that we have in our documentation about plot so or whatever the case may be for your own function, but it takes some of the pressure off of you for having to describe every little feature of every little function and does make it really easy just to link to our documentation that already exists for the function. Again, that will only work for built in Wolfram language function names. There is the next button over called resource function link that does the exact same thing for resource functions. So if it is in our resource function website, resource function repository, you can go ahead and highlight. Oh, I passed it. You can go ahead and highlight it. For example, show quotes as a resource function. You highlight that, click the resource function link. It will change the formatting to match what just happened with the Wolfram language function, and it will create a link. The third button over here, inline code, it applies the formatting, but no link. So that will be for anything that you're like. This is something that the user would type in as an input. Maybe again, this works in your text or code text cells. So if you're talking about code, not actually writing an input, but talking about code, and you want to change the formatting so that it. It looks like that Sam Serif style, you go ahead and use that inline code button for that one. There's no requirement that it be a Wolfram language function or a resource function or anything. Any text that you highlight will take on that format. Next button over, we have the Mark cells dropdown and there's a couple of options within that. Once you click on it, make this slightly bigger. We have tentative, print only, web only, and locked. I'll explain each just in a little brief detail. But to use any of them, you just highlight the cell bracket of the cell that you want to mark and then click the drop down and choose your option. All of these are kind of production tools. They're not really something that will be visible to your end user. So the cases that you would use these in first Tentative would be if you want to mark a cell that you're like, I'm writing my book right now. I think maybe I'll include this, but I might not. I don't know if it's a great example or something like that. So this is kind of an indicator to you. It changes the cell background to this blue color, which is very easy to see. That'll be an indicator to you as you scroll back through, oh, this one I wanted to come back and reconsider. Next, there's the print only. This would be maybe if you are preparing your book for both web and print and some things you're like, oh, this is only relevant to the print version. Maybe it has a URL spelled out for print. And the web version will be different. It'll just have a link so you can mark cells as just for print. With the mark cells drop down and they'll turn purple. Same thing for web only. That would be like the reverse of the print Only those ones will turn gray and the last thing is locked. And that's usually for code. It has to be used on a group of input output cells. Lock just means I want to make sure I don't reevaluate these. Maybe it includes some sort of random component and you like how it looks right now. You don't want it to change. Just lock those ones. Next off to the corner there's index field and toggle. Really I'm just explaining this to say don't use them right now. What they do Index field inserts like a field above a cell where you can type any index terms related to that cell and TOGGL hides all those fields. But the reason I'm telling you not to use them is right now, the script to compile all those terms into a usable index is only available internally. So unless you're working on your project with Wolfram Media, I would say skip that part entirely. There is a little section of the palette called Production Tools. It's a great button, about half. Well, it would be at the bottom. If you haven't expanded yet, you click it, it expands. These tools are. If you're just interested in authoring a notebook, maybe you want to do that style of publishing we talked about earlier, where you put your notebooks in a zip file and make them available as an ebook. You can probably ignore everything in here and just never even open it. But I will just briefly explain some of the options that are in here, because it will be useful for if you're interested in creating a PDF or if you're interested in self publishing in a format such as Kindle, that would probably require you to create a PDF first. So these are mostly like little minutia, tweaking, formatting type of things. If you're just publishing as a notebook, you probably will never need to touch them. So PDF creation, which would be when you're using these, this section of the palette. Todd. This is like Todd's whole job. He spends a lot of time getting things just exactly right for printing. So it can be pretty complicated getting Mathematica to produce a PDF that looks exactly how you want it to look. But the basic steps of creating a PDF are very simple. And if you're just trying to get your content available in that format so that it's available to more users, or so that you can create a Kindle book or something like that, it can be done in a basic sense, very simply. So first thing that you would do if you're interested in creating a PDF of Your content. Go to File Print Settings, show page breaks that will give you a notebook that looks something like this. You'll start to see these big black lines all the way across your screen. And you might see these little black tick marks on the cell brackets. Both of those things are indicating page breaks. So the line all the way across is saying, hey, this page break is going to go between those two cells. Little tick mark is saying the page break is going to fall in the middle of this cell, which you probably don't want. So that's kind of where the tools come in on the palette. If you don't like where some of those page breaks are falling, you can use the buttons on the palette that say page break above and page break below. And you just select the cell that you want to apply that to and choose true, false, automatic or inherited. So if you're like, I really don't want a page break here, you could select the cell, choose Page break above, and then say false and the page break will move somewhere else. You can also, using the palette, adjust things like font tracking, hyphenation, page width and margins. There's buttons there that should be fairly self explanatory. Again, that's kind of like something that you don't have to worry about. If you just want to let Mathematica automate it, that's fine. But if you're getting very specific on the layout of your book and you want it to look a certain way, you don't like the margins, you can change them in there for all of those. Hopefully the choices are fairly self explanatory. If you pick a larger number for cell tracking, it's going to create more space between your words. Smaller number, less space. Same thing for page width, margins, et cetera. So that's kind of like the very basics of how you would manipulate your PDF. Before you actually create a PDF to look how you want, then creating the PDF, just do file save as. Your little window will pop up with what file format you want to save as. And instead of Notebook, you just change that to PDF and that will create a PDF. So that's kind of the very most basic part of it really, just boiled down to the absolute essentials. I'd say after that, the next thing that authors are sometimes interested in is changing their page numbers and running heads. That can be done through the Options Inspector and Mathematica. If you're interested in things like that, I would say just check out the documentation. But much, much more than that gets a little bit too complicated. So we'll leave it at that. And that's kind of just the basics of how you could create a PDF, which again could be useful for if you need to share your content with someone that doesn't have Mathematica, doesn't to want. Want to download free Wolf and Player. I don't know why they wouldn't, but if you just need it quick and easily available as PDF format. So that's kind of the end of our presentation and we can use the rest of the time for questions if anyone has any. But I also do have the contact info for publishing here on the screen. It's just publishingolphin.com and that can be used if you want to tell me about your idea or talk about options that might work well for your book project. Yeah, go ahead. We don't have a separate template, although I think this template could work well for it. If you're mostly focused on the exercises. You can just have the exercise section and kind of ignore everything else. But the other thing I think might work well is working with Wolf and you, especially if it. If it could be like a course kind of thing. So they would have their own kind of separate templates over on that side. But yeah. Did you have a question? Yeah, Let's see. Trayton, can you think of any? I don't think we do yet, but Steven has this idea of turning some things that are found on Community into books that would be shorter. We just haven't done it yet. It might be coming soon. Yeah, I think it might be something that would be explored more in the future too. But I definitely think that anything that you can kind of bundle into that zip file we could make available on our store. So, yeah, I think we're maybe going to explore doing similar things with pack lists in the future, but. Any other questions? Yeah, go ahead. I'd say the one drawback of Print on Demand is that the cost per book does have to be higher. So. So we'd have to like. Paper costs and stuff are very much in fluctuation. Have been much higher this year than ever in the past. So I can't give you an exact number right now, but when it was time, if you were ready to do something like that, we could definitely look at what the two main services that make this really easy to do are Ingram and Amazon has a version as well. So we could look and compare what their costs are for printing your book and see what's available. Unfortunately, the other complication is if you prepare it as notebooks that can be Very easily uploaded to our store. In order to do the print on demand version, it has to be prepared as a PDF, which often takes a lot more work and more time. But yeah, it's definitely possible to do both. Well, normally, I think for our books that are sold print on demand, we are able to sometimes make them available for like 35ish dollars. And sometimes the printing cost for one book and that model can be as high as like $25. So then your margin is still only $10. And we also have to split that with Ingram. If we're working with them, they take. They take a chunk of that too. So your profit diminishes pretty quickly. I would say print on demand is probably not your route to like making a whole bunch of money. But if the idea is just let's get this in in hands and get it in front of an audience, then it can be a good tool for that. Yeah, go ahead. That's a really great question, I think. Yes. I'm actually not confident of Wolfram. You has courses in other languages yet. I should look into that. But I know that that is something that throughout Wolfram we've been trying to expand into lately. Like Stephen was showing, you know, Wolfram Alpha available in Spanish. Now we have some of his. Stephen's books available. Like Eiwl is available in Spanish and Chinese and Japanese. So I definitely think it's something that we're interested in. So if that is. Is the right market for your book and you were going to talk to Wolf and you about that, I think they would be very receptive to the idea. Well, for the ebook, you actually maybe end up getting to keep more royalties though, right? Because there's no print costs. It depends what setup you have with. Yeah, yeah. So working with the print on demand service, you do just have to make sure that you price it high enough to cover the cost. Obviously, they won't let you lose money on every book. That would be a terrible business idea. But yeah, it often comes out to something similar to what she's describing. The shorter the book, the cheaper they can print it. If it's paperback, they can print it cheaper than hardcover, depending on the paper choices that you choose. A print on demand service normally limits kind of the amount of paper choices you have. They don't give you a million choices, but some are going to be more expensive than others, so things like that come into play. Yeah, yeah, we've been pretty happy with it. Yeah, go ahead. Mm. So for Wolf and you to devote the resources to creating the Course, because it does take them quite a bit of time. I'm guessing if it's only like a small country that speaks a language, they maybe wouldn't be on board with that. But you would always have the option to do something like creating your own zip file of notebooks if that's what you want to do. And then that's just your time invested in it. You can find your own freelance editor who does speak that language to help you with it, and you can sell it for as much as you want on our store. And it's okay if only five people buy it, you know, as long as you're okay with that. So that's always an option that's available. I'll have to have you contact that team to directly answer the question. But I think that they're typically kind of more hands on. I think there was two examples that I showed of courses. The one that had more infrastructure around it is definitely something that they built. There's a lot of time from their team invested in that. The version that was just like a playlist of videos that can be much more, I think you create and they just put it up on their, on their platform. If it's really just, you know, a list of videos to play, I'm sure they still have like a process for vetting it and making sure you're not putting up something totally crazy or something like that. But yeah, I think there'd be more freedom in that option. Yeah, go ahead. Well, what you're talking about the like, give it to us and have us do everything. That's kind of our full service model of publishing. So it's definitely an option. We've done it with external authors in the past, but it has the disadvantage of, you know, taking much longer waiting for our team to be available to work on it. Right now we do have a bit of a backlog. So it's not that it's a no, it's just that it will have to wait longer. And the other component of that is if you're giving us your project in that sense, we do. I have to take it, you know, a couple levels up the food chain, all the way to Steven, actually, and make sure that it gets approved. So, you know, my boss and his boss and everyone would be looking at the content and deciding, is this something we want to invest in? Because obviously at that point it's much more of an investment from our team. So we'd want to determine like, you know, is this something that will be valuable to our readers and Things like that. No, it can be fairly easily updated, which is another benefit over not doing a print book where you have like a thousand of them printed or something like that. It can be fairly easily updated. I'll say that if I take it to our development team that has to put it on the store every week and say, hey, he wants to do another update, he wants to do another update, they'll eventually get really sick of me. But if it's reasonable, if you're doing like, you know, one every six months or something like that, we can definitely accommodate that. Good question. There's actually a lot less of a vetting process of that. So, like with him. I was just describing, you know, kind of our whole approvals process for us to be the full service publisher. If you do just want to put your zip file of notebooks on our store, we'll look at it, kind of make sure the content isn't totally crazy. Obviously we don't want to represent our brand with something that doesn't make any sense, but if it, if it makes general sense and could be useful to a certain audience, then that's basically all we care about. And like I said, we don't serve as an editor in that style of publishing. So we won't be. We won't say like, oh, you have a typo, so we won't publish it. We would actually just publish it with the typo. So, you know, that would be on you to make sure there's no typos. But the restrictions and the screening for that style of publishing are a lot less strict.