Re: Establishing "The GNOME Press?"

[Liam Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Mon, Mar 26, 2001 at 07:32:00PM -0500, Aaron Weber wrote:
> What do you think of establishing a printing imprint that would be the
> "official" GNOME foundation imprint?  If you think it's a good idea,
> what do you think of No Starch Press?

New Riders has done a *lot* for Gnome.  Eric Harlow's book for Gtk+
and Havoc Pennington's book for Gnome have made a big difference.

Other publishers have Gnome books too.

But as a programmer, if there weas a Gnome Press book about Gtk, and
an O'Reilly book about it, I'd probably go with the ORA book for a
reference and the Wrox or NR one for an intro.

So I don't think choosing a single publisher is a good idea.

On the other hand, establishing a system where you get technical
peer reviews back to publishers, with quick, accurate and brutal
feedback, would be valuable for all parties.

How about saying, in order to have the gnome bare footprint on the
cover of a book, the book has to be reviewed; promise to be able
to return a chapter every 3 days or so, and require that the reviewers'
comments be addressed. The better publishers all do this anyway, and
generally pay of the order of between US$300 and US$1000 per book to
the reviewer.

Note that the "be addressed" part is mportant. For one book I
reviewed (XML for Dummies), I said, you cannot publish this chapter: it
presented a Microsoft proposed spec as if it had replaced a large
part of the offical spec.  they published anyway, and the book had my
name on it as tech editor, and I was upset.

Lee

-- 
Liam Quin - Barefoot in Toronto - liam holoweb net - http://www.holoweb.net/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
author, The Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley, August 2000
Co-author, The XML Specification Guide, Wiley, 1999