One of the main selling points of Inform as an interactive fiction design system/programming language has always been its documentation. The Inform Designer's Manual, 4th edition is an exceptional tome by Inform's creator, Graham Nelson. It's fun to read, and it's useful both as a reference for Inform 6 and as a narrative about creating text adventure games. It includes extensive, thoughtful chapters about designing interactive fiction, IF technology and world modeling, and the history of interactive fiction.

The Inform Beginner's Guide, 3rd edition by Roger Firth and Sonja Kesserich takes a tutorial approach to Inform. It cleverly introduces Inform programming through three complete short works of IF. Its treatment is easy and blissful. Both DM4 and IBG are great books, and that they exist at all is somewhat miraculous.

Several years ago, a significant effort was made to get DM4 and IBG typeset and published as physical books. David Cornelson led the attempt to get them set up with a print-on-demand service that would make the books orderable from any major bookstore (including Amazon.com), with ISBNs and everything. At the time, print-on-demand was a tricky business, and while the effort successfully produced a limited number of professionally printed and bound copies, it could not be sustained. I was lucky enough to catch the tail end of this effort, when David was liquidating his extra copies, and I was able to snag one of the last available copies of DM4.

Last year is when I first heard of Lulu.com. Lulu is a print-on-demand service that boasts super-easy, super-fast set-up and web-based self-service account access. Best of all, Lulu has no set-up charges and no minimum order, so you can go from uploading a print-ready PDF to making the book available for purchase from Lulu's web site without paying a cent. You can then buy a copy of your book at a wholesale price, and you can even set the cover price to "at cost" to share it cheaply with others.

I was eager to try Lulu out, so I grabbed a PDF of interest off of my hard drive—Roger and Sonja's IBG—whipped up a cover using Lulu's web site, and in less than 10 minutes was able to order my own copy of IBG for about $10. I didn't have the authors' permission to do this, but I figured that since Lulu lets you keep your title private, and lets you completely purge a title at any time, I could consider it a one-time printing like I would at a Kinko's. I was so impressed with the result, however, that I excitedly approached the authors to ask for permission to make it available to everybody. Thankfully, they agreed, and even provided me with the official cover art from the previous printing effort. Because Lulu has no set-up costs and no maintenance costs, publishing IBG was effortless, and is indefinitely sustainable. (ISBN service, such that would make the title available from Amazon.com, is a one-time set-up fee. You can go without and just have the title purchasable from Lulu.com, no charge.)

Of course, I then wanted to do the same for DM4. Graham was pleased that DM4 could once again be available in print, but he noticed that Lulu only has one printing location, in New Jersey. IF has quite a bit of international appeal, and international shipping rates and wait times from Lulu are rather uncomfortable. Part of the point of print-on-demand, in theory, is to make an electronic copy of a work available to printers around the world, and have the book printed close to where it is ordered and shipped inexpensively.

We went looking for POD services with both US and UK support, and ended up at the same POD service David used several years ago: Lightning Source, Inc.. Part of what caused the previous effort to fold was a requirement LSI used to have about only being willing to work with incorporated entities. David had actually formed a publishing "company" to work with LSI. Perhaps due to demand for end-to-end POD solutions for self-published authors, like Lulu, LSI has since relaxed their rules, and now welcomes direct relationships with authors—but cautions authors about the need for expertise in producing print-ready files. (In contrast, Lulu features some simple, automated methods for throwing together a cover file if you don't have one, and for automatically scaling a PDF to a trim size.)

LSI's warning is well-heeded. While I know I could do it more easily a second time, it took me six attempts, at $30 a proof, to get print-ready cover art and text to work correctly with Lulu's printers. We had funky PDFs we were working with, generated years ago with a hodgepodge of LaTeX scripts and glue and twine. The first misprint had some rather amusing font substitutions, such as every "i" printed as a "z". Our cover art had a problem that required me to re-set the title on the spine, and I kept getting the bleed wrong, partly because LSI kept trying to save time by fixing it for me (and charging work fees) so I didn't know my file was broken. But a handful of learning experiences with Adobe InDesign and Acrobat later, and I had a perfect proof.

So now The Inform Designer's Manual, 4th edition, is available from Amazon.com or from Amazon.co.uk, and The Inform Beginner's Guide, 3rd edition, is available from Lulu.com. You should be able to order it from any bookstore with the ISBN 0-9713119-0-0. David and I are working on a hardback edition. Check it out, I'm a "publisher".

My announcement to the Usenet group was drowned out by heated conversation about Inform 7, and indeed one should be asking what use there is for books on Inform 6 if Inform 7 will be out in public beta soon. The answer—that Inform 7 is radically different, that Inform 6 will continue to live on as its own language, that Inform 6 is the official way to write extensions for Inform 7, that DM4 will not be revised and is full of other cool stuff besides a description of I6—is probably only mildly convincing to bloodthirsty IF'ers. But I hope that to whomever these books are useful or interesting, they will be aware of the ability to purchase nicely bound versions.

Postscript: I recently purchased a used copy of Creating Adventure Games On Your Computer, by Tim Hartnell. Published in 1984, Hartnell's book covers the development of text adventure games with BASIC. This book was simply inspiring to me in my youth. I cherished it for many years, and I'm loving owning it again, even though it contains nothing of interest to me now. As Hartnell's book was inspiring to me as a child, Nelson's Designer's Manual is inspiring to me as an adult, and I will continue to enjoy owning a printed copy even if I never do anything substantial with Inform 6.