The joie de vivre of Flangan's concise writing is a joy to behold; it's awful to think the modern world can't support that level of craftsmanship. It may not b

The joie de vivre of Flangan's concise writing is a joy to behold; it's awful to think the modern world can't support that level of craftsmanship. It may not be piracy, but that the free resources have become good enough, combined with programming becoming easier to lower the bar for support materials like books. i.e. he's been disrupted. For example, Stackoverflow contributes to this. I think he's right that the size of his markets means dropping the price wouldn't recoup enough via volume. He can easily get work writing tech materials for proprietary languages and systems (in-house and for-sale e.g. at MS or Oracle) - but what a loss for him and us! uhhhmm... maybe google could "hire" him? Giving him the same freedom as royalties, and just release his work for free (because it grows the web, which helps google) - perhaps in collaboration with O'Reilly, because authors still need great editors. Though Google might want Android in a Nutshell. Google might also be able to target his work more precisely, with their data on searches, and whether people seem to be happy with the public resources they find, and what particular aspects. Data-driven writing...