Re: Thoughs after discussions at OSCON

On August 9, 2005 03:51 pm, Chris Browne wrote:
> One thought suggested by someone outside of "the community" is that
> one of the things that the various "more popular" systems have gotten
> 'right' is the notion of having a "Foo Press" that is responsible for
> deploying books about their systems.
>
> This is true for various values of "Foo" including the members of the
> set {"Microsoft", "Oracle", "MySQL"}.
>
> Contrast with some systems that people hardly ever hear of...
> - There is exactly ONE book available on MaxDB, by No Starch Press
> - There is exactly ONE book available on SQLite, by New Riders
> - APress has ONE book on Firebird...
> - It is not comforting that O'Reilly only has one PostgreSQL book :-(
>
> One "capital idea" might well be to establish a "PostgreSQL Press,"
> whether in cooperation with an existing publisher or otherwise. The
> timing of this would be pretty critical; we're likely at a fairly
> critical point in time for it now, for it to happen or not.

I agree that a centralized clearing house ala postgres community for published works is a very good idea.

I've been writing for a number of years now with my own contacts into a number of publishing firms. I know a number of you, even the ones doing it in secret, currently have books on the back burner. What's stopping me to publishing is the same reason that's affecting you i.e. time. The profit motive only kicks in 'after' you've written the book, otherwise how does one survive? I would imagine companies like Oracle etc. have a subsidy system that makes it possible for authors to earch income while they write (does anybody know for sure?).