Re: DOCBOOK: Trying to compile the DocBook book.

[eichin at thok dot org (Mark W. Eichin)]

I'm not sure it should be a source for printing the book - one of the
tex or latex books, I forget which, was circulating (10 years ago)
with a license that said "you may *not* commit this to print; it is
only available as a test case for processing tools."

That was 10 years ago.  Today, I'd think that a significant reason to
buy the book on the shelf is simply that O'reilly is *better* at it
than you'll be; lay-flat binding, better paper quality (ok, maybe
not), economies of scale...  along with secondary economic issues
(supporting the continued existance of publishers, supporting small
bookstores... I'd say supporting authors through that, but I've heard
that authors don't *get* enough for that to be a credible argument :-)

Anyway, having a complete book also serves as a benchmark case for
processing and conversion tools and systems, both in that a system is
more credible if it can do full end to end processing of The Book, and
that one can say "look, here's a real book, and all these tools work
with it" is a compelling argument for developing new content in
DocBook (and such arguments are needed, to get people to actually
bother climbing the learning curve, instead of just poking around in
Word (feh) or raw HTML (feh!)...)