About 6 months ago,
ChrisAn and I flew down to San Jose to give an Indigo/Avalon talk to a large ISV.
On the plane ride down, I helped him write a couple of TOCs (table of contents) for potential book projects in the XAML and Avalon space.
Recently, Chris has managed to find the time to flesh out a TOC on an Avalon book and I've been helping him along as his first reviewer.
Naturally, every time he and I talk about it, I get the itch to start another writing project.
This weekend, I'm seriously contemplating doing another book.
My first question is whether books like I've written in the past make sense anymore.
If I look at the last 10 technical books I've bought or read, the Pickaxe book is the only one that's a pure "technology" book. Everything else is either a Morgan Kaufman book on data modeling or a CS or Math text.
Second, I've become quite enamored with the instant gratification of blogging and wiki (I'm doing more and more wiki-based stuff at work). This makes me very hesitant to go back to the old "writing in a vacuum" model of the 1990's. I think I can keep a book-length narrative going on a Wiki, and it would certainly be damn fun trying.
If I'm going to do this, my questions are:
What kinds of technical books do people buy nowadays? Are books like Essential COM dinosaurs in the age of Google and blogs?
What is the track record for writing in public and then publishing as a book? What are the big successes? Failures?
Assuming I use FlexWiki (which I love), how do I allow people to comment on the state of the "manuscript" without (a) dealing with vandalism and (b) dealing with people's egos when I don't take their comments. I don't know if I'm ready for a communal authoring experience, although communal reviewing sounds great. The thought of J. Random Internet user being able to edit my manuscript is pretty scary.
Comments/flames welcome.
Posted
Feb 26 2005, 10:28 PM
by
don-box