Dr. Dobb's is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.


Channels ▼
RSS

Design

Computer Books: Reading Between the Lines


Reinventing the Book

So what does "reinventing the category" mean in technological terms? Is the future of the book a PDF on your PDA?

Actually that particular combination leaves something to be desired, but the PDF format is currently part of the thinking of most innovators in publishing "Because technology changes rapidly, we feel that information should be made available rapidly," Thomas says. "We make all our books available as PDFs, so they can be downloaded immediately. We also make many of our books available online before they are even finished. This gives our readers access to information far, far earlier than if they'd had to wait for the book to get finished, go through production, and then conventional distribution. It also gives our authors invaluable feedback during the writing process—our readers are not shy when it comes to pointing out ways in which beta books can be improved."

And on that blog-to-book thing: It's real. Ellen Gerstein, who actually turns blogs into books, advises, if you want to leverage your blog, that "niche is a good thing." Wiley Book editor Chris Webb reveals that on his blog (not yet a book) at ckwebb.com/books/ from-blogs-to-books-questions-from-blogher. Even pros can stumble in this changing field: Seth Godin (sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/02/please_dont_buy.html) learned the hard way just what a Creative Commons license means. And Google hasn't exactly done a perfect job with Google Books, its foray into the field, which Charles Petzold calls "a massive heap of digitized books and periodicals thrown together with a complete disregard for what these objects actually are and when they were published." Ouch.

Okay, but...

Computer book author Rose Kelleher addresses that question directly at www.ramblingrose.com/ComputerBooks.htm, one of her points being that traditional publishers pay the same royalty for a technical book that will be dead when the next rev of the product comes out as for a novel that could stay in print till it's out of copyright.

"The economics of the situation demand that larger publishers put out X number of books a year," Dave Thomas says, "regardless of topic or quality." I've never quite understood that, but it may be moot at this point. And, Thomas says, "small publishers can be much more selective." Fewer computer books, but better? As a writer, I take that as a challenge. As a reader, I take it as good news.

And the field of computer book publishing could use some of that.


Related Reading


More Insights






Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.