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20030316 Sunday March 16, 2003

What to do with my Chapters? Julie suggested I just post them on this site. Then I got to thinking - what if all the authors made a PDF version of the book, and it was downloadable as the whole thing or as selected chapters. Let's say $5/chapter and you can pick and choose whichever ones you want. Sounds like a good idea, but the problem would be protecting the PDFs from being shipped around between friends. Or we could just give them away, in hopes that our knowledge would inspire others to hire us (as in a new job or a new book).

I don't know what to do, but I'd like to get my chapters out somehow. I'm afraid that if I just sit and wait, they'll never get out, and the technology will be old news shortly. The stuff I wrote about has staying power, but only until the next version of XDoclet and Struts.

I guess the good news is that I'll keep struts-resume up to date with the latest version, but the writing will be out of date by the end of the year. Posted in Java at Mar 16 2003, 10:15:44 AM MST 5 Comments

Comments:

Would other publishers be interested in the work? One of the ways you could self publish and you wouldn't really be giving away the goods would be to put the information behind a subscription service. Don't use PDF, because that gives the users ONE FILE to download and give away. However, HTML files, with seperate CSS and images makes it much more difficult and tends to keep people honest. Band together with your other author's, create a site just for your book, and allow people to sign up for an account to read it. I know I would buy a subscription. The cool thing is, if you are quick, you could possibly get a bunch of other unpublished Wrox books, and create a new site. I would pay $5/month to have dedicated writers telling me how to use the latest and greatest new technologies. Up to date documents on Hibernate, XDoclet, and that new thing being invented in the garage that noone knows about is a wonderful dream. Can you make it happen?

Posted by Carl on March 16, 2003 at 11:25 AM MST #

Matt, just watch out for the legal ramifications. Read your contract again (you are still held to it), I doubt you are allowed to sell it elsewhere without Wrox's permission. That said, know that I was one of several (many?) looking forward to this book. Your blog (and Dave's) have really whetted my appetite!

Posted by Lance on March 16, 2003 at 01:42 PM MST #

I know I would gladly pay for yours and other chapters from the book. I was really looking forward to it! Are you sure Wrox has gone under? :) --Kurt

Posted by Kurt on March 16, 2003 at 09:05 PM MST #

Lance is right. You really have to wait till Wrox tells you what you can do. Most likely, they will consider your contract binding. Since the copyrights are the the only assets that they have, I'm sure they're shopping this stuff around to other publishers to pay off or elminate some debt. If you want to have a better idea of what you can do, I suggest taking your contract to laywer to have them review you options. I expect that it is a standard book contract, where you get paid in return you turn overall rights for the work to Worx. The problem with going to a lawyer is that you'll most likely eat up any money you'd made off the contract with the legal costs. :( This is why I suggest just waiting it out for a while. You might be lucky, since you're stuff is very current.

Posted by Jeff Duska on March 17, 2003 at 09:49 AM MST #

I'd go along with the 'wait and see' suggestion. Re. putting material like this on the web (free) - I did this with some work coincidentally I did for Wrox a couple of years ago, the project plan changed after I'd done a load of the work. They were going to pay me just the same, but for some reason I never followed it up, and just dumped the material on the web (http://www.citnames.com/isacat/2000/sound.htm ). I regret this a lot now - partly because I'm skint (!) but also because the material's kind of gone down a black hole, it's on an obscure page of an obscure site. What I maybe should have done is get clearance from Wrox and approached other publishers with the material - there'd have been plenty of work rearranging for whatever the house style, but it would at least have ended up where it was meant to go. I've no experience of self publishing of stuff like this, I've seen a lot on various lists to suggest it isn't feasible for one-off paper books, but I've no idea about just doing pdf. Anyway, good luck!

Posted by Danny on March 18, 2003 at 08:00 AM MST #

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Matt Raible is a Web Architect who enjoys developing applications with open source technologies. Contact me for rates.
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