[Chicago] Fwd: UG News--Good. Fast. Cheap. O'Reilly LaunchesPDF Guides

[Jason R Huggins]

Chris McAvoy wrote on 05/31/2006 11:33:51 AM:

> On 5/31/06, Robare, Phil <PRobare at chx.com> wrote:
> > That's about 20 cents a page for a PDF.  Compare to their dead tree
> > editions, typically around 10 cents a page (480 pages and $48.00).
> 
> Personally, the $10 / 50page / PDF thing is more attractive to me than
> a 480 page $48 book.  There's a lot of topics that deserve paper books
> (duh), but there's even more than can be covered adequately in the 50
> page format.  As for the price per page, the last few $35 and up books
> I've bought have had about 50 useful pages.  I'd rather pay a higher
> per page price for more focused content than lower the price per page
> for a bunch of crappy filler.  Quality...quantity....know what I mean?

If I do the math, I hope that doesn't mean that my booklet will only have 
about 5 useful pages! ;-)

Three other considerations for going the PDF booklet route: 
1) With the PDF, you'll now have an instantly searchable reference doc. 
And it's also more portable -- a great benefit for folks who have to 
travel. Tim O'Reilly talks about PDF's advantages here: 
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/05/gentlemen_prefer_pdfs.html

2) Going to PDF allows for a faster publishing life-cycle compared to the 
traditional paper-printing process. Especially with a "fad" topic like 
testing AJAX-y web apps, if we went to paper, first, it would be about a 
year before the book came out. With the PDF-first process, the booklets 
will be out this summer.

3) We could have decided to write a 480-page book on web testing, but 
chose to release as a series of booklets, instead. It kinda follows the 
whole agile development model of "delivering small, working chunks 
quickly" and the open source model of "release early/release often".

If the series is successful, then it could justify its printing into a 
"real" book when the series is complete. But for now, I'm really digging 
the "PDF series of booklets" writing model.

-Jason

P.S. In other news on the topic of "Kid 2.0"... Declan Gregory Huggins 
came a few days early -- the very next day after the ChiPy meeting. 
Here's the photo: http://pc4w.com/newbornDetails.asp?id=1511