> From: George Gallen > Of course there is also the financial gain from the > status of being a published author.
George, toss that one by anyone in this market who has published a book, and see how far it flies. Jon? Matt? Steve? Harvey? Malcolm? (Most people here are saying "who?") These days the blog is the new book (many of us blog books-worth of material each year) but that doesn't seem to be the marketing venue that most people would think either. Brian could comment on all of that too. I'm not trying to proclaim the death of the medium. I'm just answering the question "why aren't there any new Pick books?". It seems that authors are not enticed by notoriety or the lure of future work based on being a published author. Guaranteed compensation for work is the real bottom line. As an aside, I think one can draw an analogy with why user groups have all but gone away. All of the work is put on a few board members who do that work for free and in their "free" time. Without some kind of compensation people wear down. We've seen this happen thousands of times, in the Pick market and elsewhere. It also affects most of the FOSS that people claim to love so much. How many of you know the names of the people who write your FOSS? How many of you send money to the people who write the FOSS that you rely on every day, or commissioned them to make a fix or enhancement? How many of you have found that the author of your precious FOSS got tired (or got a girlfriend) and decided not to support their software anymore? It's all a part of the same dynamic. I like to try to solve problems rather than simply pointing out all the barriers. To solve this problem of books in the MV market, years ago I suggested that in the MV community we could use a wiki as a framework for writing new books, with a Table of Contents to define the content, and guest authors to contribute content on every topic and for each MV platform. The idea didn't "fly" back then, but maybe in today's world it would have more success. Of course the lack of participation in other community wikis isn't encouraging for that initiative, but this is a different kind of project with a different goal, so this could be different. Once complete, the book would be sold as hardcopy with the proceeds used to support the environment, fund code changes to make the process better, etc. Maybe I should blog this? ;) Tony Gravagno Nebula Research and Development TG@ remove.pleaseNebula-RnD.com Nebula R&D sells mv.NET and other Pick/MultiValue products worldwide, and provides related development services remove.pleaseNebula-RnD.com/blog Visit PickWiki.com! Contribute! http://Twitter.com/TonyGravagno _______________________________________________ U2-Users mailing list [email protected] http://listserver.u2ug.org/mailman/listinfo/u2-users
