On 5/11/07, Tony Gravagno <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Dawn, I'm surprised to see the comments below from someone who spends a good amount of her time in academia. Bookstores are filled with technical books which supplement vendor documentation, much of it coming from educators who know the material as well or better than the vendors' writers.
Of course you are correct, and I likely didn't state my point well. There must be a market to do such or someone willing to write without compensation. O'Reilly is likely not soliciting books on Pick as they are on Ruby, for example. Of course we can self-publish, as I sort-of did with the "cards." You and I both have written blog entries, and that is also a contribution to writing, although I know mine do not have the same QA on them as if I were finalizing the pages of a book. These are appropriate ways to add content without as high a risk (or altruistic contribution) as writing a book. There is less likely to be an altruistic effort if the material is very vendor-specific and the vendor is not paying for the book to be written. I considered putting in a proposal for a MultiValue for Dummies book, for example, when I was thinking I would learn to write as a hobby, but opted for the blog instead because I could write whatever interested me without concern for market value, with the blog being lower risk (or at least I deemed it worth my time).
There are hundreds of books which cover the same material in different ways. Just look at what's available for Java, VB.NET, PHP, XML, Linux, and a wealth of other topics.
Of course, and Amazon and Barnes & Noble have received my "thanks" for such efforts.
People buy books in part because they like _how_ authors explain topics, even though much of the material is repeated in most texts. I also choose some of my books by publisher because the bigger ones use standard templates, formulas which work well to allow readers to get through complex material comfortably. The MV DBMS is quite complex, composed of many subsystems. It's not just a data model, it's a "database management system". There are a great many books on Oracle and SQL Server, and I'm sure there could be a number of books covering various nuances of Universe too - and Unidata, QM, jBase, D3, Reality, OpenInsight, Cachi... The notion that the Pick data model is too simple for a book is, uh, simplistic,
Obviously a book can be written about it, as many have (see the list at jes.com), but I don't know if there is a sufficient market for it today. I do think there are ways to angle it that might be marketable, such as showing one project start to finish (I'm planning to document the project I'm launching, for example, but don't know if that will be good book material until the resulting product is wildly successful). There might also be a market for a more general data model book that does not focus on the relational model, however, which is where I was putting my research and writing efforts in 2006.
From that, I have a little "market research" of sorts. Perhaps you
have different figures than I have, but within a year, my blog and Trilogy together had between 9,000 and 10,000 "absolutely unique visitors" according to Google Analytics. If as many as 10% of those folks bought a book (likely a high estimate), that would be only 1,000 copies sold. I was thinking of marketing to database professors as supplemental material if I ever pulled it into a book, and I think I could work at trying to make a market, but at this point I don't see the ROI (even if not speaking purely in dollar terms). Here is another way to think of "simple" as I intended it. If you were to hire a new employee who had to learn UniData, for example, would you feel you NEEDED a book from the bookstore for them to get started on the aspects of the project specific to MV, or would the combination of existing materials, including vendor manuals and in-house standards, be sufficient?
and the fact that there are so many MV DBMS vendors in some ways only validates the idea that we just need more books.
If you want a successful book in dollar terms, you might want to talk to Jon Sisk about the writing and publishing industry and get an idea of his estimates before you sink too many hours into writing. If you have other forms of compensatio in mind, there might be better ROI than if aiming for dollars. I have some more "chapters" in mine (blog entries), but the "free" thing only works when I get something "I want" for it. In my case, I have an interest in helping our industry get back to a data model that is not as constraining as that used by many/most shops. I'm not sure why I have such an interest, but it is my little area in the profession where I have tried to give back. I have worked on the side on my little project in that area for almost 5 years. At this point, to my delight, the industry is headed that way with or without me, so my writing might be completely unnecessary on that front, making it less enticing to me.
My best, Tony "Can and usually does write a book on anything" Gravagno
Between us we have a not-at-all-ready-for-publication book in this thread alone, eh? --dawn
Dawn wrote: > I suspect that > someone would write another one if there were a market for it, but the > vendors all have documentation and the user exchanges, such as > u2-users, help get folks the rest of the way. It is neither mainstream > enough nor difficult enough to prompt someone to write a new book, I > suspect. Additionally, the various Pick vendors have mostly gone > their separate ways on client-server and there are many third-party > products, so other than the basics of Data BASIC and the Pick data > model, most of the information needed is vendor-specific at this > point, I suspect. ------- u2-users mailing list u2-users@listserver.u2ug.org To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/
-- Dawn M. Wolthuis Tincat Group, Inc. tincat-group.com Take and give some delight today ------- u2-users mailing list u2-users@listserver.u2ug.org To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/
