$10 seems about right for an ibooks form of document; furthermore, with
iBooks we have a way to keep the document “updated” as things evolve, and
that can be done for free for folks who’ve paid for the doc.
I’m not sure if the same is true for Amazon’s platform, and I have ~0
experience with Barnes & Noble’s nook platform or any other platforms that
might be in use in other countries.
- Garrett
On Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 1:00 PM Karan, Cem F CIV USARMY RDECOM ARL (US) <
cem.f.karan.civ@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
The problem with dead trees (and any electronic form that mimics them) is
that the underlying technology needs to be very, very stable before it's
worth investing in the book. TCP/IP, sockets, lots of algorithms, etc.,
have that level of stability and understanding. nng's API is going to
undergo (probably minor) changes that will make a dead tree really, really
frustrating to read when you're first trying to learn the API ('in the
example it said to do X, but I had to do Y to make it work because nng's
API changed! This sucks!'). Once you get nng to 1.0 and the API is
completely stable, you'll have more luck selling a dead tree.
All that said, I really do like well written _and thoroughly
cross-referenced_ PDFs that I can take with me on the road (handy when
you're on the plane and don't want to pay to get internet access). I'm
cheap though, and probably would only pay ~USD 10 for anything. I would be
interested in the and “NNG Transport Developer’s Guide” as I'm working on
writing my own transport for MANETs, but would need to layer on a bunch of
stuff on to nng for it to work.
Thanks,
Cem Karan
-----Original Message-----
From: nanomsg-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:nanomsg-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Garrett D'Amore
Sent: Monday, February 26, 2018 1:25 PM
To: nanomsg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Non-DoD Source] [nanomsg] Would you buy a “printed” (or ebook)
form of the NNG Reference Manual?
I’ve gone through the process of making a unified book form of the NNG
reference manual this weekend. Its about 212 pages long, although it isn’t
complete. It did take some effort to preprocess the pages in order to
generate what is actually a quite beautiful document.
I’m wondering if there would be interest in having a printed form (or
ebook form, perhaps via Amazon or iBooks) of the book? Would you pay for
it (a real desk reference)? How much would you be willing to pay for such
a thing? What form is more attractive to you, printed and bound format, or
electronic book form?
Note that all of the technical content in the book is also available in
online manual pages (and I might add RFCs), so there would not be any
compelling need to purchase the book — I’m not trying to force users to
spend money to access NNG in any way. (Some of the ancillary material, such
as the Preface and chapter introduction materials are only in the book form
though.)
The idea would be to generate a little more revenue to continue funding
the development of NNG and the related protocols, and give users a way to
give back to the effort while showing their “pride” in NNG with a coveted
space on their bookshelf.
I’m also contemplating writing a real “User’s Guide” — more like a
traditional tech book with tutorial and recipes, sort of like “NNG for
Dummies” (perhaps titled “Building Distributed Applications with
Scalability Protocols” — which could cover nng, mangos, and even legacy
nanomsg.) Again, I’d like to have the option to generate some revenue by
formal publication. It’s less obvious to me that such a book would
necessarily be made freely available — it might depending upon how the
authoring of it is funded.
There’s some opportunity to create some other documents as well, although
probably less widely interesting (“NNG Protocol Developer’s Guide” and “NNG
Transport Developer’s Guide”, which might be combined, or perhaps an “NNG
Internals” book.)
- Garrett
