Re: xml, books

[Oleg Dulin <dulino@olegdulin.com>]

> serious change on my part.  It's necessary, though, because as Tim Bray
> summarized my employer:
> 
>    "Oh, and by the way, that XML book you were thinking of writing?   
>     Forget it." [1] 
> 
> XML book sales have dropped substantially, even relative to the overall
> decline in technology books.  A few books dominate the broad (typically

I noticed an interesting trend -- many authors appear to publish their
books onine under Creative Commons or GFDL license for free and then it
gets published by O'Reilly. Is that because O'Reilly is hesitant to take
on book projects ?

I have to side with some of the posters on this thread that changes need
to be made to how books are released. I am not a big fan of printed
computer books. I prefer to use Safari, which is great and is a
wonderful start.

Safari should be extended to allow publications of smaller books,
perhaps periodicals along the lines of academic journals. Authors should
be able to use a CMS to update sections of the book as technology
changes and get editors' approval in a matter of days.

For those who want printed books, a regular subscription will allow them
to receive journals on a monthly (or quarterly) basis similar to how
academic journals by ACM and IEEE are released.

Conventional Wiki sites such as http://wiki.cocoondev.org/ are a
cacophony of unedited articles, many of them incomplete and outdated.
What we need is someone like O'Reilly to create a compromising solution
that will give the readers up-to-date documentation _and_ the quality
editting and approval process.

Kind regards,
Oleg