The beta book trend is spreading
Posted by Curt Hibbs Fri, 17 Feb 2006 23:56:00 GMT
It feels good to be part of an innovative community. Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, the venerable Pragmatic Programmers seem to have a knack for finding and/or creating the concepts and products that fuel many innovative trends.
The print industry, be it magazines or books, is at a crossroads trying to figure out how to transition into the digital age. When Dave and Andy decided to create their own publishing company, the Pragmatic Bookshelf, they created the industry’s best tool-chain for authoring and publishing books.
Their most recent innovation in this traditionally stodgey industry was the Beta Book. This is a book that is sold in electronic form (PDF in their case) before it is finished. This is great for technical books because it gives the readers early access and allows them to provide feedback and corrections before the book is cast into stone.
All-in-all, it is a win-win situation for everyone. They deserve your thanks (and your business).
It looks like other publishers are following the Pragmatic Bookshelf lead. First, it was O’Reilly with their Rough Cuts, followed closely by Manning with their Manning Early Access Program.
I expect we will see the other technical book publishers follow along in due time.
UPDATE: Several readers have informed me that Manning has been doing this for years, even before the Pragmatic Bookshelf (at least as early as 2003, possibly earlier). Thanks for the correction.
I’m surprised to read that Manning has been doing this for so long. I recently bought David Black’s book through their early access program and I have to say the Prags sure do it a lot better.
First, when I went to download it, there is a cluttered screen with the first info being about some DRM program. It appears you need it. But the PDFs are there too, so eventually I clicked that and was able to download and read it without the other software.
Next, in order to be informed of updates you have to ‘watch’ a forum. You need to create a login for the forum and it isn’t the same as the login you had to create to access your MEAP book.
Speaking of which, when you created the login for the MEAP book it creates a password and emails it to you. You then need to log in and change your password if you want to use something you’ll ever remember. I forgot to do that and had to dig through my gmail for the generated one. Why?
The book itself is great, but boy, they could sure use a little help on the user experience.