I just released InDepthInfo on Modern European History: A Homeschool Course. It was about a year in the making. I mainly wrote the book because I said that I would, but it all more or less fell together naturally. The chapters are all based on web pages I built to supplement lectures that I gave to homeschool students over the last year or so. What makes it a good course is that I have included not just text, but study questions, chapter quizzes, and a comprehensive exam at the end of the book. Parents need not worry about making assignments, making up tests, etcetera. There is also a pile of supplementary material on-line.

Anyone who has read this blog over the long-haul knows that I have been worried that my format is anchored too far in the past. I have experimented with video, but I have not been completely happy with the result. I have published several books in the past. I have a degree in history, so coming up with a survey history of modern Europe seemed almost a good step in the direction of expanding the InDepthInfo format and brand.

The question is, how to market it. So far – few sales. But then it has only been out for about five days. I have tried ads on Facebook and Google, however, the response has been minimal to feeble. That may be the fault of the ad or the fact that homeschool parents are not quite buying courses for their kids yet.

I must say that I feel I have come up with a quality, useful product. The only thing I am not completely happy with is the art work. But then, I have no one to blame on that score buy the artist. Myself.

Naturally, they picked the weekend to do it, when the big media outlets are home for the weekend. It appears the feds are cracking down on blogetery.com. I confess, I have never used blogetery, but I have visited the site in the past, led there by a search on one of the big search engines.

The Feds are evidently accusing them of  reprinting copyrighted material. Which, in my book is bad, as I get stuff stolen all the time and would like to see the bad guys put in their place once in a while. However, I am not sure that blogetery is at fault. After all, they are only providing a platform. It is rather some of their users who are swiping video material and putting it on-line.

Where does the responsibility for someone posting copyrighted materials on your site end? What if someone should respond to this post with a full length quote from another blog? Without knowing the provenance of the comment, would the innocuous mcgelligot.com be shut down?  Does Google bear responsibility for pointing to them?

Well, this whole thing is still developing, but it does seem pretty heavy handed. I won’t go into a political rant. I leave those for some of my other blogs.

Five drafts and untold number of hours later, I’ve finished the InDepthInfo History of Modern Europe. I have sent it to my editor for one last run-through. Yes, I am fortunate enough to have an editor. She comes in the form of my mother-in-law who was a grade school teacher for thirty some odd years. She is a superb grammarian and will root out whatever mistakes are left in the book.

I completed the cover work yesterday. What a chore. As noted in my previous post, whenever you publish a book, everything has to be done meticulously.  Once done, there is seldom a possibility to go back an change things. Wait, with on demand publishing it can be done, it’s just a pain in the neck and all the older volumes will still have the old mistake in them. I suppose we could start labeling books with version numbers the way they do with computers. Imagine, “Huckelberry Finn 1.4″.

My editor should have the marked up edition back to me in a week or two. Then it is on to publishing and marketing.

I have been debating in my mind on the relative quality of articles and work on the web as opposed to that in books. I am partly engaged in this internal struggle because I am in the middle of writing a book that is based on a series of articles on European History I did on InDepthInfo, which in turn, are based on a course I taught to some homeschoolers.

At first, I thought that putting the book together would be a simple matter of copying and pasting the articles in a word document and then making a few edits and adding some other features and maybe an extra chapter or two. Yes, I did do all of that. However, the editing proved to be far heavier than I had anticipated. I had been satisfied enough with the articles to post them on the web, but I had not been satisfied enough with them to put them in a book. And why would that be?

Once the book is published, that’s it! I can’t change it. It is like writing in stone. I can’t add a comma, delete an awkward phrase, or insert a new paragraph. I once reviewed a history book where the word “throne” was misspelled “thrown”. I groaned every time I ran across it. I don’t want this to happen to my book, so where two edits might do for an article and one might do for a blog post, five or six is not too many for a book. All this editing, I believe ,raises the quality and quantity of the information.

Even so, the same thing that raises the quality of the initial book over the articles, is the same thing that allows the information and the writing to become dated. The online articles I can revise at will, and I often do. In fact, InDepthInfo is on a kind of editing cycle where articles are reviewed periodically for grammar and fact checking. I will especially dive into an article if I have had an email about it. This means that internet articles can be improved over time - but will they necessarily? I would say that on most websites they will not.

So, who wins, are books better or web pages? As much as I write on the web, I am still more likely to trust the info in a book.