Friday May 20, 2005
David is right on track when it comes to books on technical topics, we all want the info now, not six months from now. This entire prolonged process (prepress work, printing, distribution) is something the entire technical publishing industry is suffering from, initiatives such as O’Reilly’s Safari service is a small step in the right direction, SourceBeat is even closer. I’m sure there’s several other alternatives out there already, or at least being currently worked on. But I’m still missing that silver bullet.
Fact is, this is one of the things that has been occupying my busy mind lately. See, I’ve been thinking (emphasis on thinking here) a lot about writing a book on several topics regarding Rails. Not your traditional technical books with 450+ pages, but more in the line of a range of smaller inexpensive ebooks. Of course, being eternally torn between the internal entrepreneur/optimist and the realist/pessimist I’ve done little to actually take even a small step towards this. The realist keeps telling me I’m not a writer and sometimes I think he may be on to something there.
The Exciter is a wonderful example of this; despite many drafts on longer tutorial-style texts, few of them have actually been given the attention and rewrites that they would need to be publicly served, hence the dull state this site is in.
Enough talking and daydreaming. I applause DHH and most of all Dave Thomas for being willing to take the initiative we all been waiting for. “Beta Books” is hopefully one small step in the right direction.
Jul 06 at 01:19
Sounds like spiderworks.com would be a perfect fit for the publishing ideas you have.