From: rbs{at}snippets.org
To: c_echo{at}yahoogroups.com

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003 tomtorfs{at}village.uunet.be wrote:

> BS> Obviously, you did miss part of this. The reason I wanted
> BS> to reach him was to see if I could obtain reprint rights
> BS> from he and Pearson/Prentice Hall. If so, then both he and
> BS> PH would receive royalties.
>
> I would expect Prentice/Hall to have enough contacts with
> bookstores to sell the book without needing to get involved
> with contractual obligations with individuals.

Obviously true. The problem is volume. C has been eclipsed by C++, C#,
Java, and other languages in the minds of the general computer book buying
public. PH (and other publishers) consider it a dwindling niche market,
which is why it hasn't been reprinted lately. In order to be commercially
justifiable, PH has to see being able to sell a printing of tens of
thousands of copies per run. They don't see that in the case of this book,
and they're probably right. That leaves it in publishing limbo - still
sought, but off the radar screen for commercial publication.

> If you are hired by an American company to write
> instruction/documentation for their existing software and, in the
> process, encrypt it down to three pages that only make sense if the
> reader buys a book only _you_ can sell them it would appear a conflict
> of interest to me. If I was the person who hired you I would also fire
> you for doing that.

How fortunate, then, that I'm not working for you. ;-)

In that case, however, I'd compare the cost of my time to write the
document without the book with the cost of the book. The book would cost
roughly an hour's worth of my time and would save a minimum of two hours
(and probably a lot more) of my writing time.  Even if I were the author
and self-publishing, it would still make good economic sense to pay for
work already done at a price which allows the publishing costs to be
amortized over multiple customers.

> I hear this frequently but truth is no one is that good. I'd wager there
> are three or four others out there as good or better.

OK, find them.

> BS> If you don't read Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic, you don't look
> BS> for an English-speaking author to produce a new Bible, you
> BS> find a way to translate and reprint the existing one. For
> BS> software QA and departmental standards folks trying to
> BS> write C coding standards, Straker's book *is* the Bible.
>
> Apparently not or the book would still be sold here. ;-)

As previously noted, that depends totally on the size of the audience. The
comparison with the Bible is good in another way, though. Even if there
were only a handful of Christians, it would probably still be published by
dedicated believers. As it is, it's also published by commercial entities
based on the size of the target audience.

In the case of Straker's book, those who rely on it are few and their
numbers aren't growing at a significant rate. Further, most of the "true
believers" already have a personal copy. This spells commercial poison, so
the only one likely to publish it anymore would be one of the faithful.

> I'm referring to your style. If you attempt to force me to buy a book
> from you to interpret what you write my response would be to stop
> reading what you write.

That's OK, I'm willing to take someone's money in order to write what they
want, cribbing liberally from Straker in the process. It will take more
time ($$$) and I don't have to share those consulting dollars with anyone.
However, in the client's best interest, I should at least make an effort
to let him pay less money for reams of documents already in existence for
only the publication cost (which I must share with the copyright owners).

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