I know next to nothing about publishing, so do take my opinions with a rather sizable grain of salt.
With the growing prevalence of ebooks, the "waste of paper" seems a bit weak. And the ridiculously rapid pace of tech advancement strikes me as more of a boon than a problem - for most topic-centric books, you only get to sell it once to an enthusiast. With tech books, you get the opportunity many times over.
"rather than buying tech books i just read blogs, quora, stack overflow, and i think a lot of people do the same. it's faster, cheaper, etc. for example, as i am learning iOS programming, the docs on apple.com are great, as are some third party tutorials."
And if the content of the book doesn't outpace those sources - I wholeheartedly agree, the book shouldn't exist. But I buy books with the expectation that they do provide me with a better and faster experience than I would have gotten by just googling on my own.
All that said, I sure as heck haven't written a book. So obviously the author is better versed on this topic than I am. So, giving them the benefit of the doubt - perhaps there's some sort of opportunity here. Like (pulling at the lowest-hanging fruit), rather than creating "just" a book, creating a subscription-based community around a topic?
This is usually true of language or framework-specific books, but not of more general books like The Pragmatic Programmer.
If you're looking to write books that will be read years from now, you need to focus on wider or more fundamental issues. The caveat here is that primers for long-lived languages like C++ have remained relevant for decades.
[+] [-] Irfaan|14 years ago|reply
With the growing prevalence of ebooks, the "waste of paper" seems a bit weak. And the ridiculously rapid pace of tech advancement strikes me as more of a boon than a problem - for most topic-centric books, you only get to sell it once to an enthusiast. With tech books, you get the opportunity many times over.
"rather than buying tech books i just read blogs, quora, stack overflow, and i think a lot of people do the same. it's faster, cheaper, etc. for example, as i am learning iOS programming, the docs on apple.com are great, as are some third party tutorials."
And if the content of the book doesn't outpace those sources - I wholeheartedly agree, the book shouldn't exist. But I buy books with the expectation that they do provide me with a better and faster experience than I would have gotten by just googling on my own.
All that said, I sure as heck haven't written a book. So obviously the author is better versed on this topic than I am. So, giving them the benefit of the doubt - perhaps there's some sort of opportunity here. Like (pulling at the lowest-hanging fruit), rather than creating "just" a book, creating a subscription-based community around a topic?
[+] [-] shagbag|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prpatel|14 years ago|reply