[Zope] Re: [Zope-book] Re: [Zope] Zope Book Beta

[Jeff Hoffman]

On Tue, 31 Oct 2000, Wolfgang Strobl wrote:

> On 31 Oct 2000, at 12:54, Michel Pelletier wrote:
> 
> > That was a joke.  Sorry.
> 
> Uh, oh.  Well, my thought was as follows: people are already 
> annoucing making PDF versions, which are a much greater 
> potential harm to to the number of sales of a printed book.With a 
> good pdf file, I can get to my local prinshop and get a perfect 
> bounded book back within half an hour.
> 
> On the other hand, a MS HTML help file is of little use other than 
> having a compact, searchable file which fits well into a 
> development environment on Windows. Frankly, I can't see how 
> these could do any harm to selling your book. To the contrary; I 
> tend to beleive that having a properly indexed and tightly 
> integrated online format might even might help selling the book. 

I certainly can't speak for O'Rielly, but I can take a guess at their
logic. It goes something like this:

If people begin reproducing copies of the book, in PDF, HTML Help,
whatever form, and distributing it, they will soon be all over the net.
It is not in its finished form. It may have misspellings, or technical
errors that will (hopefully) be corrected before publication.

When the final version comes out, will they be able to guarantee that all
old copies of the book are updated with the final version? If someone
downloads a copy with a lot of errors, and gets a bad impression of the
book, is that fair to O'Reilly, given that it was not the final version
they were looking at?

If we simply wait until its final before reproducing it, this becomes much
easier to manage.

At least, that's my $0.02.

> Wolfgang Strobl

--Jeff

---
Jeff K. Hoffman                               704.849.0731 x108
Chief Technology Officer                      mailto:jeff.hoffman@goingv.com
Going Virtual, L.L.C.                         http://www.goingv.com/