4 ms·

It would definitely be handy for technical books but I can't see this being widely adopted because most technical books aren't free. Fixing errors and sending

• antirez 16y ago
  I'm currently writing a "commercial" book (the redis book), and I'm every day more confident that the future of many tech books is self publishing. You get hardly rich writing a tech book for a traditional publisher, it is a lot of work for little money most of the time (you are not going to sell, usually, a large number of tech books, they are not "best sellers", and the percentage you earn is very low). So after all, why not self publish? You have more control on what you write, you earn a lot more if you publish the book on the Kindle for every sold copy, you are free to provide the book for free on the web, and so forth. From this point of view github is a viable way to handle the writing of a book. What is needed is a license that allows everybody to contribute, so that the electronic version is free for everybody, but only the "main" authors have the right to use the book for commercial purposes (Kindle, Printed, ...). Otherwise if the book is under a non free license it can be still interesting to use github in a public repository to get feedbacks, comments, and so forth. We'll see what happens but my next book will be a self-published one for sure, written using a github public repo, if I'll ever write another one :)
  • JonnieCache 16y ago
    >I'm currently writing a "commercial" book (the redis book) Nice! When do you think that's going to be out? (Horrible question to ask an author I know.) And if it's not self published, who is publishing it?
    • antirez 16y ago
      Not sure, but I think it will be out this summer (sorry, unable to be more specific). It is published with O'Reilly.
  • ivanr 16y ago
    I wrote my first book for a traditional publisher. Later, with my second book, I decided to effectively self-publish, for two reasons: 1) the money is better and 2) I wanted to be able to update my books whenever I had something to say. My first book, which was published in 2005, hasn't been updated once, even though I have hundreds of notes on the margins of my own copy. Talk about frustrating. The problem is that self publishing is a lot of work if you want to do it properly. It requires a large up-front investment, which is difficult to justify if you're only going to write a book or two. I spent months learning the publishing business, building the processes and the software. To support my continuous publishing ideas, I built a fully-automated workflow based around DocBook, from which I produce print, screen, and various other digital formats. While I enjoyed all of it, most people wouldn't. I was also lucky to have the support of my wife, who is actually managing the company, as well as the sales and marketing activities. Experiencing all this, we are now transforming our publishing company to to provide low-cost support to authors who wish to keep control and a big chunk of their royalties, but also to focus on writing (rather than publishing and the other repetitive activities). Lean is the word here, and we pass most of the savings to authors. That's where I think the future of technical publishing will be.