Nando, I don't know how many people will understand what you're saying, but I am in complete agreement with you. A few years back in the Fusebox world, it became very fashionable to lament that John and I were in it for the money. The Fusebox book costs $85? Absurd! A ripoff. What people didn't realize, even though I tried to explain it, was that the fixed costs for doing a book that sells 2000 or 20000 are the same, but in one case, the gross revenues are 1/10 of the other.
So, at $85, authors were effectively being paid minimum wage and Techspedition made almost nothing from the sale of the book. Instead of being seen as trying to supply info to a small community and merely trying to recoup costs, in some corners, it was viewed as an attempt to exploit the community. To say that has a chilling effect on producing more books is a gross understatement. This idea that things "ought" to be free, if widely adopted, will guarantee that very, very little of value will be produced. We can't charge for it (that would be wrong, according to this view) and few are willing to work together without pay to produce something. I started a Fusebox wiki some time ago and spent probably 20+ hours on it. To my knowledge, one other person contributed to it. I'm not complaining; I just think that it's easy for all of us to adopt attitudes that, on the face, appear fine: stuff should be free. But the law of unintended consequences can't be ignored. Free or nothing translates to nothing. Actually, it falls to a few people to heroically try to supply free training/info for the community. Joe Rinehart recently published a blog entry saying he I recently purchased a copy of "Head First HTML and CSS". I know HTML and CSS pretty well already, as I imagine most of us do. One of the reasons I bought the book is that I am such a huge fan of the Head First series and I want to encourage O'Reilly to continue to produce these books. Rob Brooks-Bilson wrote an excellent O'Reilly book on ColdFusion, but it was never renewed due to lagging sales. I subscribe to CFDJ even though a lot of what's in the magazine is of not much value to me. Occasionally, something will be helpful -- maybe very helpful -- and that pays for the annual subscription. But I also think that the demise of CFDJ would be a bad thing for the CF community and I want to do what I can to make sure that doesn't happen. I would love to create online training and tutorials, but there are real and significant costs associated with this. Will the community be willing to pay something for these in quantities large enough to sustain the effort? I'm going to experiment with this. I really hope it works -- and that others can use the same model to share their expertise. ---------------------------------------------------------- You are subscribed to cfcdev. To unsubscribe, send an email to [email protected] with the words 'unsubscribe cfcdev' as the subject of the email. CFCDev is run by CFCZone (www.cfczone.org) and supported by CFXHosting (www.cfxhosting.com). An archive of the CFCDev list is available at www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]
