On Sat, May 19, 2001 at 09:10:02PM -0700, Paul Makepeace wrote:
> I'm curious what the perceived payback is on books: kudos on the one
> hand, benefit to humankind on the other, and then cash. How does it
> all stack up?
The kudos is fun but unless you write something completely
earth-shattering, you're quickly out of fashion. I see the cash as an
incentive to get books written that might not otherwise have been
written, because again, unless you're writing something
earth-shattering or coming out with something new every six months or
so, sales will dry up. Royalties are bonuses, they buy goodies: a
holiday here, a new computer there. And soon, I expect, I'll not be
getting so much in from Beg. Perl, and they'll be buying jewellery for
the other half or video games.
I do it for the benefit - Beg. Perl was written to help one single
individual learn Perl, and if other people have learnt Perl from it,
that's a bonus; the book I'm writing at the moment, I'm doing it because
I want there to be a really damned good book about XS out there, and
there isn't. If I'm going to write a book, it's because I *really
really* want to write it, so the money is in a sense immaterial.
So why don't I forego the cash and do it all under an open publication
license? Well, firstly, I do: I spent rather a lot of time helping fix
up the Perl documentation, and now I'm planning a bunch of books under
the OPL. But if a publisher's going to throw money at me for writing
something, I'm far more likely to sit down and get on with it, rather
than getting bored and hacking Perl instead. Well, that's the plan,
anyway. Sometimes it doesn't work like that, either. :)
--
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be
regarded as a criminal offence.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra, SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 17, Number 5
