Book Thickness
There are some very good books out for .NET 2.0 – CLR via C#, CLR via C++/CLI, Windows Forms 2.0, Data Binding with Windows Forms 2.0, etc. Soon there’s going to have a wrath of WinFX (sorry I mean .NET 3.0) books like Applications=Code+Markup, Programming Avalon, Adam Nathan’s WPF book, numerous WCF, WWF and PowerShell books etc. The problem I have with most of these books is their thickness. Try carrying around any of these books that are +1″ thick together with everything else you carry to read during your commute. Why can’t these thick books be broken down and published in volumes.
All these thick books are bulked out with GUI screen grabs, and CDs stuck in the back cover. I suspect publishers do this because they think it creates an impression of high value for casual browsers.
None of the classics are like this. They’re much denser and packed with insight that gives them lasting value. Like Scott Meyers, or GOF patterns, or Alexandrescu’s Modern C++ Design.
Matt, I hear your pain! Let us hope that the Sony Reader is released sooner rather than later and that; 1. it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, 2. does a decent job of rendering PDF, 3. isn’t encumbered with craptacular library management software, 4. more technical publishers take a lead from OReilly and PragProgrammers and start to over more PDF-only versions of their books.
[...] At the same time more technical publishers are embracing DRM-free PDF’s as a distribution format. And thank goodness, technical books are heavy man! At the moment it is mostly indie or smaller outfits like The Pragmatic Programmers and 37signals with Getting Real (from which the revenue of $215,000 is almost ‘pure profit’) that have fully embraced this idea but more ‘traditional’ tech publishers such as Manning and O’Reilly (read Tim O’Reilly’s piece on PDF distribution) are waking up as well. Not to mention many other non-technical publishers which distribute some of their catalogue, mostly in DRM-encumbered and frequently platform-specific formats, through a variety of online ebook vendors. [...]
The News before The News » Print, press & publishing’s impending seismic shift said this on August 7, 2006 at 11:04 am |