[OpenLayers-Users] OpenLayers Book

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 01:39:24PM -0800, Jeffrey Johnson wrote:
> Can't we just do this right and get O'reilly (or other) to commit to  
> publishing a book on OL and advance the $ required to get it written?

The royalties for writing a book seldom compare in any way, shape, or
form to the amount that you could make -- with significantly less effort
-- from doing OpenLayers work as a developer.

You'd need to find a potential author who has more need for glory than
cash, enough knowledge to sell it, and probably a couple hundred hours
of free time, in addition to the fact that the market for technical
paper books is collapsing rapidly and would therefore be making a
pittance in royalties on that investment.

Add to that the fact that any paper book is likely to be out of date as
soon as it is published, especially if it's not written by someone
participating in mainline development, and you've got a disaster waiting
to happen, even if you can publish simultaneously in user-editable
electronic form alongside the nn-user editable paper form.

Technical books for rapid development software are, in my opinino, going
the way of the dinosaur. The new way to do it is collaborative
electronic development + print on demand. 

Sufficient organizational support for OpenLayers could probably make
this happen (though the sponsorship program is probably not the best
path for it), but the organizations would not be able to look at it as
an 'investment' designed to return cash, but instead as an
investment designed to support the ecosystem around the OpenLayers
project (and associated goodies that come along -- similar to
sponsorship).   

I don't think talking to O'Reilly or any other paper book publisher is
really going to be a way forward here, practically speaking... thugh
glad to be proven wrong by anyone who wants to try :)

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
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