[FM Discuss] final TOC

[Andy Oram]

Thanks, Adam! Again, because O'Reilly is involved in your write-up, I'll try to say something about O'Reilly's work. Unfortunately, I can't say much. I didn't hear anything about the Wikipedia book (how the work went, or its sales) but I can confirm that normal publishing doesn't fit well with group authorship. We tried to create a couple other books on a wiki without success.

My impression is that FLOSS manuals uses a fairly conventional authorship model. Can you fill me in? I see books being written with one author per chapter, or even in larger chunks. Of course, people can edit and make changes, but there is a sense of one person being in charge of each chunk.

O'Reilly, and several other publishers, are trying to figure out whether we can do print-on-demand and slip changes into each copy of a book we print. There are several difficulties with that. For instance, don't people who buy a print copy deserve updates? If so, how does the publisher deliver them?

The book about the concurrent language must have been Haskell. It's a mammoth book.

Andy