2 Years ago (yes, TWO YEARS) I wondered here, wow, why has gmail been in beta for 3 years? Well today, after a total of 5 years, Google has finally removed the beta sticker.
Now maybe I should delete some of that mail in my gmail inbox from June 2004!
It's been an interesting couple of week for our PHP program. Since Pádraic Brady first posted his "Art of Deception or Publishing PHP6 Books" and we discovered it via Twitter, we've been watching the community response, responding ourselves (which Pádraic then covered here), and looking at our future books to make sure we don't fall into the same mistakes again.
Based on that, the book most impacted by what we've learned is Beginning PHP6 by Matt Doyle. This had been slated to publish at the end of July and we pulled it off line at the printer to take another look. After discussions with Matt, he's reworking a few parts of the book, we're going to have it tech edited again with the TE running 5.3, and the book will become "Beginning PHP 5.3 with a PHP6 Preview". The PHP6 parts of the coverage will be moved, footnoted, or otherwise explained so that readers see they're optional and forward-looking. That's going to mean an additional 3-4 weeks work for Matt reviewing the page proofs for the whole book, and add in a few more weeks for editing and relaying pages for whatever changes Matt makes, and we're looking at probably a 2 month delay in the book. (BTW, it will take a few days for our own sites to reflect this change and weeks for 3rd party retailers to make it.)
So why the change and the discussion of it here? Obviously, the way we published the first couple of PHP6 books was a mistake. And I take responsibility for that. There are a lot of people involved in making good books, in making good book decisions. But at the end of the day, in my role for Wrox I take responsibility for that. It's not the authors' fault. I wasn't asking the right questions of the right people. I won't miss that again.
What could authors have done better (since I know many authors read this)? Communicate with your editors! Writing a book is hard work and a lot of time for you. Don't do something wrong for us just because you think that's what we asking for. That wastes the time you invest. And if you aren't finding the answer you think is right with your editor, find the publisher or someone else at the publishing company to discuss it with. This goes for any author with any publisher. We're pretty much all blogging and on twitter, facebook, and LinkedIn in these days. If you've got an issue with the way your book is being handled, you can find us and tell us, we make ourselves easy to find. Don't wait until after the book is published to tell us if it were up to you you wouldn't have done it this or that way that we asked.
Customers, readers (programmers in this case), keep talking to us. We're using Google and tweet searches to find everything we can that's being said about us. But if we miss something and you've got something important to share, find us. If you tell us and we don't listen, shame on us. But for the most part, many publishers and editors are trying to listen.
And if you can, try to assume the best until you see otherwise. The editors, the authors, the publishers - we want to publish good books that are useful to you. Most of us are in this kind of work because we like books, or programming (for Wrox books), or books and programming. But we're human, we make mistakes. Don't assume our mistakes are evil, greedy, or otherwise malicious. If we repeat the same mistakes and don't learn, well that's another story.
I appreciate all the time Pádraic, other readers, and the authors have all put into helping us with this. We'll keep doing our best to win you all over with better books.
There's been a lot of hand-wringing about the the effect of Google Book Search but I think the real loser in the recent publisher's settlement with Google stands to be Safari. If you think about the way you read print books, or even ebooks in PDF or Kindle, you're probably doing a lot of cover to cover or at least full chapter reading. But Safari (and Books24x7 for that matter) seem much more usable as "search" tools to find a specific answer to a specific need. In using either of these, I'm much more likely to need to read just a few pages, up to maybe a chapter at most.
Enter Google Book Search. Going forward, you're going to see a lot more books in this designated "limited preview." Rather than thinking of this as a limit, I think readers will quickly discover that here's a new way to get a few pages of answers from many books. From as many or books more than Safari for example. Google Book Search does let the publisher of currently copyrighted books set how much of their book can be "previewed" by a reader in a set period. Most publishers will set that at around 10-20%. For a typical 500 page computer book, that's going to give readers 50-100 pages to read free.
And I think, that has to be more of the typical book than the typical Safari reader reads from any one book.
So what about book choice and selection? There it already seems Google is using their muscle to outpace Safari too. For computer books, the books published in the last few years are what most people read most.So I did quick comparisons of a few key topics, how many books published from 2005-2009 are available in Google Book Search vs Safari:
I'm sure there are books and topics that Safari (and Books24x7) users will find they need, or need more of, that they can't get or get enough of from Google, but will that be enough to continue paying $23-$43 a month for Safari? Or will the additional note taking features in Safari be enough to justify subscribing?
If you read the O'Reilly Radar blog and in particular, posts in the last few years about the "state of the computer book market," it's no surprise that the market for selling computer books is tough lately. One of the few bright spots in the industry has been Safari, which isn't accounted for in the print book sales "bookscan" data in the market reports. And if Google Book Search makes a big dent in Safari and other similar subscription services, that is bad for readers, authors, and publishers. For publishers who are counting on Safari or similar services to subsidizes investments in content (that is paying the authors and editors who create the books), it's not a good sign. And it probably means you'll see less investment in innovative services like Safari (which O'reilly, Pearson, Microsoft, have been building for more than 10 years).
This is an interesting surprise to me. Amazon released their source code for all the Kindle devices. What does it mean?
This is surprising to me when I try to look at it from Amazon's business perspective. They controlled the device and the channel in the existing model, I'm not sure what they think they had to gain. I wonder if this is in some way tied to the Kindle DX textbook trials announced recently, and maybe they felt that they needed to open the platform to avoid the appearances of the beginning of an ebook monopoly?
From a customer perspective, it's a huge win if this drives down the cost of Kindle hardware. And maybe Amazon's win is making the hardware ubiquitous at someone else's expense to drive more Kindle book sales.
As always, these musing are purely my own. Even though I work in a company that sells a lot of books through Amazon, I don't have any direct knowledge of their business decisions.
Updated 6/17/09: Thanks Eric for pointing out (see comment) that the original Kindle and Kindle 2 source have been available a while and that all that's new here is the DX code. I wonder then if anyone knows of any 3rd party apps, devices, or sites making use of this source yet?
Imagine this: you go to send an email to a new contact you met at a conference and are told by your email server that you have to many email contacts and can't send this message until you delete some contacts. Or imagine that your all of your company's email is dependent on one external service provider, the universal email service provider for the world.
That's unfortunately where we are with Twitter and why Twitter needs to evolve, again. I say again because if you look at the history of twitter, it's already evolved and evolving, but it will need at least one more big step on the evolution chain. That Twitter history would be:
The Future of Twitter Is...
Twitter's next stage of evolution needs to look at the API usage as the future and build a service around that. That evolution probably shouldn't mean growing city-size data centers to house what will be en ever growing need for server space. Instead, Twitter needs to de-centralize. I see one of two possible paths here:
Either of these schemes involves some fundamental rework of how Twitter works, and neither is a Trivial task. Neither completely solves the issue of how Twitter successfully makes money from their creation either.
But if Twitter becomes as popular as email, instant messaging, or text messaging (and why shouldn't it be that popular?) the current architecture seems unsustainable.
There's much excitement and retweeting today on the WSJ article How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write. It's all based on a faulty premise that the majority of the population would with instant access to 10's of millions of books do more reading like the author Mr. Johnson does.
Sorry to break your bubble Mr Johnson but here's what the internet age has shown us sells when instantly available:
Video games
Fart noises - want your iphone app to sell 100x more? Just add fart
Movies, and their cousin TV shows
And of course, porn.
The world is willing to pay for mostly passive entertainment, with the minor exception of video games and their false sense of active participation.
What we book people are often lured into forgetting is that we're a little different. We'll sacrifice the instant entertainment of a 2 hour movie for 6 hours reading the thing in print. We're living anachronisms, along with our children whom we shower with books in hopes they'll carry on our holy mission of reading.
I'm completely stumped by this. Earlier this week, Amazon announced to their North American Amazon Associates that they would no longer pay referral fees to Associates for users sent to Amazon through paid searches on Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines.
I'm trying to understand the business logic here. If an Amazon Associate spends money advertising on Google and other search engines, and that paid search leads to a customer buying from Amazon, why does Amazon value that transaction less to the point of not calculating it for Associate referral fees?
Can anyone explain this?