On 13 Sep 2013, at 23:21, Ash Moran <[email protected]> wrote:
> I got excited until I saw it was ebook-only. Am I the last remaining luddite > who will only read books on paper? Ooooh, off-topic rant! Ace, let's get started! :-) I love my Kindle Paperwhite. I really do. However there are acceptable exceptions to wanting paper books instead: 1. Anything you want to read in the bath, obvs. 2. Anything that only comes in print or PDF. PDF on Kindle is awful 3. Where the physicality of the book is important. I have a few first editions and some books on unusual paper stock and with particular care taken over the ink, the binding, the boards, etc. (I love a good bit of marbling for example), and I love to rummage in second hand bookshops for books that will never make it to eBook but have titles that make my head giddy concerning the most bizarre of topics. The physicality of the book then is at an advantage where the physicality is key and where electronic formats fail: highly pictorial books, the fetish for particular editions, because the physical form of the book has been carefully designed and somebody hasn't just hit some buttons reading "Baskerville, Octavo, perfect bound" and letting 10,000 volumes fall out the other end mostly indistinguishable from any other book on the market from your competitors. Those exceptions aside, you're clearly an idiot and a luddite. :-D Nearly all tech books make perfect sense on Kindle, I think. Being able to dive into any one of a dozen classic programming texts wherever I am - a meeting, an away day, on my sofa, on the train, whatever - without having to carry those dozen 300+ pp. said books everywhere is a major advantage. That said, I have had a design in mind for some 4-5 years - and a plan to self-publish - books based on the official documentation of Ruby and popular frameworks like Rails that would only make sense in paper form and would be of extremely high-quality and of high utility to most programmers in their daily work. Spiral-bound (so it sits flat on a desk next to a keyboard), tab indexed, and with the content itself being able to in a single instance show the most important information about a piece of functionality - and how it evolved over versions/time - I think if done well from a design perspective would be useful. I've thought of it entirely as a design problem rather than a publishing problem and considered where online documentation fails and where existing books also fail, and found the happy medium. I think I have a good idea. I might progress that before the year is out, I might even share the design sketches if people are interested. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NWRUG" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nwrug-members. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
