thinking of freebsd public literature

[dlavigne6 at sympatico.ca]

> Jim Stapleton wrote:
> > I notice a dearth of FreeBSD books by various publishers. It might
> > help to have a nice book out by a big publisher. Any interested in
> > and/or knowledgeable enough to write a book for O'Reilly Press (or
> > some other big company, but they seem to be top dog for a lot of tech
> > books). I could help to an extent, but I'm not heavily knowledgeable
> > enough about security, and really have only been using the OS for
> > about a year.
>
> Finally, check out the thread "Is FreeBSD simple enough for Novices, 
> Will FreeBSD accept Office 98 + Publisher" currently ending on questions at .
> Ted Mittelstaedt (author of "The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide",
> published by Addison-Wesley) gives an analysis that might also help to 
> explain the "dearth of FreeBSD books by various publishers" in the last post.


I echo Ted's statements. For example, O'Reilly uses trend analysis software:

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2006/view/e_spkr/1825

If your topic isn't one of the top 5 words on their report (and trust me, BSD is not), it isn't relevant. Most publishers do a similar analysis and use the results to decide which books to push. For example, a typical publisher may publish 500 books a year, but only the 20 of which are perceived to be the top sellers will be promoted in their marketing campaigns. Book sellers respond to those campaigns and assign shelf space accordingly.

No Starch (which publishes all of Michael Lucas' books) is the only technical publisher I'm aware of that still follows the old model. If Bill thinks someone will be interested enough in the topic to buy the book and the author writes good stuff, he will publish it. Bill also markets all of his books equally.

As a side note, I will never go through a traditional publisher again (for a multitude of reasons I won't relate here) and my upcoming next book is being self-published.

Cheers,

Dru
http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/unix/bsd