iGaming

Today, I'm posting about a new concept that came to my inbox from the originators: iGaming.  In short, iGaming is aiming to produce a free digitally-published series of books on gaming (Tabletop wargaming, digital games (xbox, DS etc.) and trading card games -- M:tG, etc.).  A short intro to the concept can be found in their YouTube promotion:

What stands out about this project for me personally is that it is a not-for-profit venture: this is quite rare these days.  But they need help: programmatic, artistic, and, funding.  More information, and the kickstarter info, can be found here: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/igaming-digital-books.

The full background is repeated below.

So what it is iGaming?
iGaming is the brainchild of a small group of people who have been heavily involved in gaming for many years. We plan for iGaming to produce a free digitally published series of books on gaming! What do we define as gaming? Well, we’ve grouped gaming into three categories…

Tabletop gaming (Gamesworkshop, Privateer Press, Flames of War etc.)
TCG gaming (MTG, Pokemon, Yugioh etc.)
Digital gaming (Pokemon DS series, COD, WOW etc.)

But iGaming is more than just writing a series of books on gaming, it is designed to be a community hub, while the guides will be written primarily by myself and my team (well, me and 3 others…) we want the community to get involved, to offer up bits and pieces to include and to offer us support…

So what about these books?!
These will all be absolutely FREE (with the exception of the printed books, these you’ll have to pay for postage, but that’s it!) – I’d like to make it clear here that we are a non-profit group; we are not doing this to raise any sort of money for ourselves, just to give something back to the community!
Ah, back to the reason we’re here, the books! We want to create a series of books on gaming which will be published digitally, on the iPad (iBooks) on Android (ePUB) as PDFs and as printed copies.
As far as the books go, we want to produce one for each element of each system of each type of gaming… For example we want to produce a tactics book for each army of each Tabletop Gaming system, we want to produce a walkthrough for digital games and we want to produce guides for TCGs (little bit harder to break down how we’ll divide the books due to the different nature of each game system).
Each book will be…
-          Greater than 100 pages in length
-          Full of interactive features (videos, pictures, interactive HTML widgets - so much we want to pack in!)
-          Be useful and tested! We will have a ‘beta group’ who will test and review our books first, so when we do publish them, they will be of a high quality!
-          Regulated by you! Yes, you read that right, as these books are being sold for free and for the sole purpose of giving something back to the community we want you to shape the way they are made, you want more of one type of book being produced, then fine, that’s what we’ll do!

There must be a catch; you can’t be giving away all these books for FREE?!
Nope, no catch, everything we produce will be free (minus any shipping costs if you order a physical product) but we do need some help getting started…

Help us get this project started!
Like is said, we need some help getting started, while we have most of the things we need to do this project, we are lacking a few things
-          An iMac (without this we can’t create any iBooks, or add art to any books of any format)
-          An artist (you do want high quality pictures and illustrations in your books don’t you?!)
-          A programmer (while we all have computer knowledge, this is mainly in the book creation department rather than in the programing side; we need someone to write us a few HTML widgets)
Cost wise this equates to £2000 ($3000) ideally we want to raise more, as this would let us give out more printed copies of books, buy higher quality equipment etc. Basically the more money we can raise, the faster we can produce higher quality books!

So why should I donate?
In conclusion, if you donate you will be helping us kick-start a massive project, one which will provide resources for, and benefit you and the entire gaming community! We’re not asking much, any small donation will go a long way to helping us achieve our goal!
If you can’t give then we ask that you help us out by sharing this page; help us get our idea to as many people as we can!