Return-Path: owner-linux-activists@Niksula.hut.fi Return-Path: Received: from joker.cs.hut.fi by hydra.Helsinki.FI (4.1/SMI-4.1/39) id AA10631; Thu, 6 May 93 20:25:43 +0300 Received: from joker.cs.hut.fi by niksula.hut.fi id <62441-3>; Thu, 6 May 1993 20:24:19 +0300 From: "Linux Activists" To: "Linux-Activists" Reply-To: "Linux-Activists" X-Note1: Remember to put 'X-Mn-Key: DOC' to your mail body or header Subject: Linux-Activists - DOC Channel digest. 93-4-6-14:10 X-Mn-Key: DOC Sender: owner-linux-activists@Niksula.hut.fi Message-Id: <93May6.202419eet_dst.62441-3@niksula.hut.fi> Date: Thu, 6 May 1993 20:24:12 +0300 Status: RO X-Status: Topics: Getting docs printed... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: andyo@ora.com (Andy Oram) Subject: Getting docs printed... Date: Thu, 6 May 1993 16:54:42 +0300 Thank you, Michael. (I didn't offer this guy any free books, folks.) I feel that the O'Reilly people working on Linux are part of the community, and I want us to work together. Let me explain here the difference between the collaboration I'm thinking of and pass-through documentation. The important thing is deciding what you want to offer your readers in the long run. Dual-channel strategy (quality publishing and online distribution) Nifty phrase, eh? Took me almost 10 seconds to think up. In this strategy, which is what I suggest for us, I'm not promising to publish any single book, much less setting a policy of, "Give us everything when you're ready and we'll pass it through." I have read quickly through the KHG, sysadmin guide, and uucp guide now, and I'll have things to say about them in my next message (this one is already getting too long). Go ahead and stick to online distribution -- or quick printings for limited use -- for some kinds of books. You don't need the enormous overhead of professional production, marketing, and so forth, for quickly changing material, or stuff used just by hackers. (Some of the KHG is useful for other people besides kernel hackers.) You want the freedom and flexibility to change them on a whim and tell people to get them again. For more substantial books that need careful pacing and attention to detail, you want the full professional treatment. You want an editor telling you when concepts have dropped out, or when you're boring people with details that should be in later chapters. You also would benefit from nice graphics and cover design, a focused marketing campaign, etc. If this is sounding to you a lot like an O'Reilly book -- then you're absolutely right. And congratulations for knowing so well what we put into our books. In short, what's good for the readers is good for you and for the publisher. Publish the major books with strict attention to accuracy and long-range value, but use cheap printing or online distribution for less formal books that people learn about through the grapevine. Pass-through publishing This is the other common approach, which is not limited to Prentice Hall, and which you should think about in the abstract for a minute. In this strategy, a publisher says that it will publish whatever you give them because your output is assumed to be informative. This is used for conference proceedings all the time, for instance, and people are just thankful for what they get. Prentice Hall is commonly associated with this kind of printing because of its System V and OSF doc sets. Prentice Hall is also a very important traditional publisher with excellent books in its catalog. I greatly respect the publisher of K&R, K&P, and W. Richard Stevens. But I disagree with their pass-through approach, I'm not going to mince words here. The System V doc set historically shows lots of problems -- for instance, people expect all UNIX systems to work the same way and they don't. AT&T (later USL) stuck in all sorts of AT&T-specific tools and features and you can't tell which ones they are. The doc sets don't contain the kind of good conceptual background material you need for an introduction (so people have to buy the O'Reilly book just to get started) nor do they have the details of how things work on each system (so people are forced back to the man pages when the going gets tough). OSF offers even more of a cautionary tale. The products were in constant flux, long past the moment they sent their documents to Prentice Hall. The published versions are loaded with inaccuracies, things that are no longer true, and things that don't work yet (and may never work). I'll summarize my objection to pass-through publishing for computer books this way: it doesn't really offer the readers anything they need. The publisher and author like to claim that people are starved for information, so anything is helpful. I don't think that documents freely mixing correct and incorrect information are useful. What's useful is the dual strategy I proposed above: taking the time to make the book really good when it's of long-term interest, and keeping your publishing options as flexible as possible through online distribution otherwise. So let's keep talking -- and see my next mail, specifically about the three alpha drafts currently in the LDP. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Andy Oram O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. andyo@ora.com 90 Sherman Street, Cambridge, MA 02140 (617) 354-5800 fax (617) 661-1116 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ End of DOC Digest ***************** ------- .