ElenQ Publishing

License

Creative Commons - By - Share Alike license allows the content to be shared and improved. The goal is not only to create final contents, it's also to create a reliable source that encourage the creation of new contents with open licenses.

Formats

The books are going to be released in paper, web and easy-to-print digital format. Apart from that, we'll provide a version control repository with the contents in order to ease the edition and improvement of the content and the creation of new derivative projects.

Paper format is not required to achieve our goal but we consider it a key point because of the following reasons:

• Paper is still the most comfortable way to read, take notes, etc. and the most used in libraries and universities.
• Depending on the lifetime of the physical books, they may have lower environmental impact than other formats.
• Physical rewards are more popular than the digital ones, which are going to be available for anyone anyway. In this case, physical books are the vehicle to obtain the funding for the publishing of the contents themselves and the maintenance of the necessary infrastructure.

The paper format is going to be printed in a local eco-friendly print shop.

Philosophy

Philosophy of the contents is based on the idea of supporting autonomous learning and critical thinking. This is achieved focusing on the fundamental concepts rather than the details, providing a solid basis to build knowledge on top of. All contents provide references to allow the readers research further.

Books

Physical books will be printed with a soft-cover in a B5 size, makes reading easier and allows the inclusion of examples while it keeps the price as lower as possible. The printing-friendly version is prepared for A4 format and it's designed to be easy to print and bind in any local copy shop for a affordably.

What's informatics?

This document written by Giacomo Tesio and translated and adapted by Ekaitz Zarraga aims to describe what is informatics from its origins and create debate about the ethics around it and the current uses it has. This book serves as opening and statement of purpose of the whole collection because Giacomo's ideas match perfectly the goals of ElenQ Publishing even if they were developed independently.

The estimated length of the book is between 50 and 100 pages in the printing format.

Programming in Python

Written by Ekaitz Zarraga for his courses, this book is a Python programming manual that also describes general programming theory.

This book has been successfully tested in its previous versions on training courses but, before publishing it for general public it must be improved with some changes that encourage and ease autonomous learning, like exercises, footnotes and deeper explanations due to the lack of in-person classes that filled that gap during the courses.

The current content of the book exceeds 100 pages in A4 format before the rework. Once converted to B5 for the physical edition and with the extra content added it surely exceed 200 pages.

Languages

In the minimum goal of the project contents will be released in Spanish because it is the mother tongue language of the main author and reviewer, Ekaitz Zarraga,

English translation

The optimum goal of the project is the translation of all the contents to English. Even if one of the goals of the project is to fight against the tendency to publish all technical books in English, due to its wide use, the English translation will allow other translations to happen. English can serve us as a vehicle to reach people that know languages we do not and are able to translate the contents to them.

On the other hand, the author and reviewer is able to speak English quite comfortably and that lets him guide a translation team more accurately and paying attention to the technical terminology.

Publishing date

Since de end of the campaign, the team will need around four months to publish the contents and send the rewards. The estimated delivery date is really conservative because the everyday work can stall the project and external factors like printing and translation might influence the delivery date.

Future work

The project's goal goes further than the publishing of these specific books. Some other books are planned like a detailed description of the World Wide Web, and others are waiting to be researched.

Translation to other languages are also planned and the publishing of independent translations is also a possibility.

This project's goal is to provide good quality material for anyone interested on learning informatics. The goal is not to make a collection of books for dummies, instead, it tries to create high level technical books that are accessible for anyone.

Understanding accessiblity as the lack of legal, economical, linguistic or functional limits that usually appear in these contexts we, as self-taught people and educators, faced in many occasions:

• Copyright that prevents the contents to be shared or improved.
• High prices that prevent people from unprivileged contexts access technical knowledge.
• Contents exclusively published in English that prevent people who don't know English to access the knowledge and exclude possible authors that don't feel comfortable with the language.
• Non accessible formats for people with disabilities (visual or others) that prevent disabled people from accessing the creation or analysis of technology and promote the creation of non-inclusve technology.

We think all those problems have easy solutions with a low investment.

Ekaitz Zarraga

Telecommunication Engineer (Electrical and Electronic Engineer equivalent in Spain), founder of ElenQ Technology, an ethical R&D project that focuses on free and accessible knowledge. Apart from his job as an R&D Engineer at ElenQ Technology where the self-directed learning is key, Ekaitz worked as an educator in several contexts: technical courses for workers, advanced courses for research centers, government-funded courses for unemployed people, etc. All of them in the area of Computer Science and IT (data analysis, advanced programming, web-scraping, blockchain, etc.)