O'Reilly Squeak book?
Mark Guzdial
guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
Tue Apr 23 18:37:22 UTC 2002
On Wednesday, April 17, 2002, at 02:10 PM, Bruce Cohen wrote:
> At 9:38 AM +0200 4/17/02, Cees de Groot wrote:
>> But that's why you want to aim at a publisher like O'Reilly, who
>> really tries
>> to push your book. Not one like the others who pay you, put a single
>> copy on
>> lots of store shelves, and then forget they ever published the thing.
>> Are
>> there other publishers like that?
>
> Not that I know of. The experience of authors I know (my own doesn't
> go beyond a couple of phone conversations with publishers) is with
> Prentice-Hall and Addison-Wesley, both of whom appear to think their
> job is done when the first box of books is packed (shipping the box
> doesn't seem to be in the job description). I wonder about Springer,
> because they publish a rather eclectic collection of titles, from very
> abstract and abstruse to nuts and bolts, but I don't know of anyone who
> has any experience with them.
>
I've been pleased with my interactions with Prentice-Hall. They're
there pushing the Squeak books whenever I've seen them at OOPSLA and
SIGCSE. Alan Apt (our publisher contact for both books) *REALLY* knows
his stuff -- I get a lot of insight into how the CS book market works
whenever I chat with him. There are, of course, hiccups from working
with an enormous company with all kinds of agendas (e.g., Prentice-
Hall's Quality Control department gave us all kinds of grief on the CD
for the second book because their standards required "No bad web
links!" Well, we included a copy of the entire Squeak Swiki on the
CD -- have any idea how many links have gone bad over the last few years
of use?!?)
Thanks for the vote of confidence, Alan! However, I'm in the same boat
as Randal -- maybe those of us who are still employed need to complain
more about being overburdened so that The Powers That Be start hiring
back those of us who aren't! :-) I'd love to see an O'Reilly Squeak
book, and I might even be willing to organize/write it, but in the short
run, I've got too much on my plate.
Mark
More information about the Squeak-dev
mailing list
|