Re: [DIYbio] Book or Blog?

You could do both. No Starch Press has published a couple of books that started out as blogs and still remain free online, e.g. http://learnyouahaskell.com/. Bill Pollock, who runs No Starch, is super friendly and approachable -- drop him an email and ask?

Cheers,

--mlp

On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 7:24 PM, Dakota Hamill <dkotes@gmail.com> wrote:

Get paid for your time, write a book.

On Nov 28, 2015 1:21 PM, "Sebastian Cocioba" <scocioba@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Everyone,

I've been bouncing around the idea of compiling the 7+ years of plant tissue culture experience I've mustered into articles for my blog for a long time now. I have a ton of content as drafts and galleries of original pictures and whatnot and am stuck at a crossroads and would like some advice. My plan was to keep posting small articles to my blog about the little steps needed to make a transgenic plant in very newbie-friendly detail. A lot of my contacts recommended I just compile a book and publish it so that I can get a little compensation for the information that would be a little hard to come by in that specific format. I have always put teaching people first and tend to forget about supporting myself which is what led me to this intersection. 

Would people rather have a nice free blog that steadily outputs content with some tasteful adds pertaining to relevant companies and products, or pay a small price for a Julia Child-style cookbook of plant tissue culture and transformation recipes concocted by yours truly with plenty of pictures and commentary?

 What would be a good price point?

 Is it worth the delay to have a physical edition one can tote to their bench or is it more useful to have an organized blog website thingy that people can reference digitally?

What would be a good starting project? I was thinking a GUS assay since it covers a bunch of various topics and the plasmid is commercially available and off-patent. I'm not a fan of GFP since the stable ones require harmful UV and I have yet to transform the couple fluorescent plasmids I've optimized into tobacco to verify that long wave UV will work with decent effect. Another option would be anthocyanin knockouts/add-ins or variegation gene introduction but would require further testing. GUS requires a bit more chemicals but the result is a strong insoluble blue precipitate against a white background of ethanol-bleached plants. No fancy equipment necessary! I'm also not stepping foot anywhere near glowing plants for many reasons so please don't ask to make a book about making a glowing plant from scratch. That being said, if you had a plant biotech cookbook, what would be your desired "Hello World" project? Herbicide tolerance alone is boring, non-visual, and controversial/unethical in spread so that's out of the question. It's kinda funny that the perfect intro project would require a lot of research on my part into verifying chromoprotein stability in lower pH (plant cytosol is ~5.6 - 5.8) and shipping things to the vacuole, etc, etc. so any feedback on what you all want to have as the main project of the book (if you even want a book in the first place) would be awesome!

I thought I would ask the community that would be most interested in learning more about the dark-green arts (you gals and guys) if it would even be worth the trouble. I've noticed an overwhelming lack of good plant biotech material out there and there are too many comments about plant culturing being "hard to do" and "unpredictable" which I think is just silly. Anyone can do science and everyone can do plant biotech. The hardest part seems to be aseptic technique and culture-to-culture media decisions but those are the most straight forward. I am a very visual learner so I would include a ton of pictures with various angles and explanations so anyone ages ~8 and up (maybe even earlier if fine motor skills are honed!) can make their own plants. Either way let me know what y'all think about the idea of Book vs Blog for introductory plant tissue culture. I would still maintain my blog for the day to day content and more advanced topics but for the newbie I think a desk reference at a fair price would be ideal. Thanks!

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