Technical Books as Software
I thought I discovered the concept “Books as Software” but Google search reveals that it was done before me by Shriram Krishnamurthi:
http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Memos/Books-as-Software/
It’s good to see that I wasn’t alone to notice this concept after publishing my first book on Lulu. However I went further and registered as a publisher and now use Lightning Source for long term publishing through Ingram and online bookstores like Amazon. Lulu now serves the purpose of a bookstore, instant publishing to test concepts, and also to publish in formats that are not available through Lightning Source.
Moving forward and thinking about multiple books brings us to consider book series as software product lines as well. We also need some kind of a management process that I call Iterative and Incremental Publishing taken from the family of scalable Unified Processes like Rational that I am used to. Scaled down to just one book it can be called Iterative and Incremental Writing as well. I was thinking about during past two months and finally came up with an idea to release a short book in October to help others to spring into technical self-publishing and writing especially software engineers. Iterative and Incremental Writing techniques can also be applied to traditional publishing as well where you already have an accepted book proposal similar to vision and requirements documentation and perhaps you have a draft chapter and table of contents that can be considered as a working software prototype.
The forthcoming book has the following draft product details:
- Title: Technical Books As Software: Iterative and Incremental Writing and Publishing
- Author: Dmitry Vostokov
- Publisher: Opentask (15 October 2008)
- Language: English
- Product Dimensions: 22.86 x 15.24
- ISBN-13: 978-1-906717-03-2
- Paperback: 128 pages
I think there is a big difference between technical and other book genres like fiction so I decided to limit myself to technical book writing and publishing although some concepts of iterative and incremental development can be applied to other book categories as well where a process needs to be established to achieve the writing and publishing goals.
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -