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What Kind of Books do You Want?

Posted by Cliff on from the bending-the-ear-of-a-publisher dept.

ctrimble asks: "I'm the acquisitions editor for a technical publishing company (not the one with the animals, but we have had six of our books reviewed favourably, here on Slashdot) and part of my job is to determine what books my company should publish. This consists, mainly, of me sitting in my apartment eating peanut butter sandwiches, reading Slashdot, and writing perl scripts that generate titles in a Madlibs type fashion: "Hacking Ruby for Midgets" (forthcoming in July). Unfortunately, there's a bit of an impedance mismatch between my methodology and filling the needs of the programming community. Market research is tough to do in tech books since you need to forcast about a year in advance. So, let me pose the question to you -- what kind of books do you want? What spots do you see as needing to be filled? For that matter, do you even want dead-tree books, or are eBooks and/or online documentation sufficient?"

3 of 920 comments (clear)

  1. Definitely want dead tree books by wiredog · · Score: 2, Redundant
    It's hard to write notes on the margins of an e-book. Hard to read one of those while eating, since I don't eat at my computer.

    What kind? Zope, and other web application servers are an area of interest. Hmmm, sorry, can't think of any other interests that aren't met by the Books With The Animals On The Covers. Heck, I've got 5 of those within arms reach right now.

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    Best Slashdot Co
  2. A book about Slashdot by WTFRUDOINBiotch · · Score: 1, Redundant


    How about Getting Modded for Karma for Dummies?

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    Make money with Real Estate Investing
  3. Re:dead tree books by pyite · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Humor can make a great book even greater. In the margins of Concrete Mathematics (Knuth, Graham, Patashnik), theres actually somewhat of a "discussion" on two pages:
    "It seems a lot of stuff is attributed to Gauss- either he was really smart or he had a great press agent."
    "Maybe he just had a magnetic personality."
    "Actually Gauss is often called the greatest mathematician of all time. So it's nice to be able to understand at least one of his discoveries."
    I mean, come on, it doesn't get better than that. Here's a couple more:
    "I see, we get 'real' functions by using imaginary numbers."
    "Why is 'Euler' pronounced 'Oiler' when 'Euclid' is 'Yooklid'?"
    "You know you're in college when the book doesn't tell you how to pronounce 'Dirichlet'."
    "(The formula {0 or 1} stands for something that's either 0 or 1; we needn't commit ourselves, because the details don't really matter.)"

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    "Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman