Introduction

Why Authors Are Reluctant

• Information is needed now, within hours. Traditional book publishing has far too long a lead time to provide current information.
• Many people would need just a little of the information in the book, not the whole thing. They will not be prepared to buy the whole book.
• Information goes stale. Even the well-respected Java In A Nutshell contains errors because the language specification changed. The author needs the right to update the book.
• Trees are sacrificed for books that may be read only once or not at all.
• It is a waste of effort to research information and then restrict its audience only to affluent North Americans who buy the book. The need for knowledge is global. The raw material should also be freely available on the Internet.
• Authors don’t want to slave away for months writing a book that nobody buys. They want to be sure the idea will work before investing huge amounts of their time.

The Solution

In future, books will be composed on-line on the Internet. You can come and view the on-going work in progress, much as you might watch a sidewalk artist. You can make comments, offer criticism, ask questions, and make suggestions for future directions of the work. It becomes a collaborative process. Strange as it sounds, even if you are silent, you can still contribute to the process by where you focus your attention in the book. Software automatically monitors which parts of the book you are reading, and forwards the statistics to the authors. This gives them clues about what is the most pressing thing to write about next.

There is already a pilot project of this form called The Java & Internet Glossary. Any time a new Java-relevant term appears, usually within hours, there is a definition for it and a URL reference in the glossary.

Paying

1. Pay per view.
2. Subscription.
3. Via advertising of products likely to be of interest to readers of the on-line book.
4. Via a Internet-general flat-rate receiver-pays per-packet content-charge.

How Do Traditional Book Publishers Fit In?

• software for collecting pay-per-view fees from customers.
• editors to polish the more stable parts of the text.
• Publishers provide artists to produce illustrations.
• Publishers periodically take snapshots of the ongoing work for mass run paper versions of works that are proving to be popular.
• print-on-demand factory to print and bind books from the most recent snapshot of the on-line work. The customer gets to specify things like binding, size of type, monochrome or colour, resolution, paper quality, and which chapters are required. The custom made books are then shipped by snail mail or FedEx.
• editing tools to authors to make their jobs easier.

Benefits to Book Publishers

• You don’t have to be omniscient. You invest almost nothing until a work has proved itself popular.
• Your incremental costs per book sold are almost zero.
• You reach a global market with no extra effort.
• You keep selling the same work over and over even if there are only minor revisions.
• You totally scoop the paper-only publishers.
• Your books benefit from immediate customer feedback. You don’t have to wait for the reviews.
• Onlookers who helped construct a book will help sell it for you without pay by chatting it up on the Internet.
• People will pay a small fee just to browse a book, or to take away a few crucial pages.
• It totally automates royalty payments and book orders.
• The technique permits you to put all your existing books on-line and start collecting pay per view royalties from people who would otherwise go to libraries to borrow them.
• It lets you compete with all the completely free information on the Internet.
• If a customer uses a book almost every day, you get continuing revenue.

Technical Details

The Java Applet ensures people can’t read the book without paying the modest pay-per-view fee. You may let people come in for 5 minutes at a time without fees, or to read free teaser information, or whatever other rules turn out to work optimally to maximise sales.

The Java Applet may also control whether the customer is permitted to keep a permanent copy of what they view.

The Magic Java Glossary

Dealing With Information Overload

1. Much of the material I know already. I still have to wade through it.
2. Much of the material is about esoteric options that are almost never used. I still have to wade through that too.

If you had books in electronic form, the information could be coded in various ways with how advanced/esoteric it is. The viewing software could then dynamically hide or reveal more details. This would make the electronic books far more valuable than paper ones.

See my essay on essay on SCIDs . I am proposing creating similar tools both for browsing program code and for browsing technical documentation. Think of documentation not as a manual, but as a structured database.

Information Overload Categories

Categories for Information Overload
Icon	1	Scale	10	Icon	Comments
	overview	Detail	detailed		How detailed this material is. This allows the reader to either get an overview or to get details.
	easy	Difficulty	difficult		How difficult this material is. This would mainly be used to grade sample exercises. This allows the reader to filter out material he likely already knows or material over his head for now.
	mundane	Surprise	surprising		How unexpected this material is. This lets the reader focus on the meat and potatoes, the ordinary cases, things as you might expect or focus on just the gotchas.
	basic	Rarity	esoteric		How rarely used this material is. This lets the user focus on the basic options, the ones nearly everyone uses, or look just at the rarely used ones once he knows the basics. Esoteric options are not necessarily difficult, just rarely used.
	cloudy	Familiarity	understood		This is not a category the author would normally assign. The reader assigns it as he learns the book to mark off parts he already understands. That way he can either review material he already knows, or concentrate just on the material he does not understand yet. The authors can use this automatically-collected feedback from their readers to discover the sections of the book that need to be re-written.
	wrong	Accuracy	accurate		This is not a category the author would normally assign. The reader population as a whole assigns it by their automatically collected feedback. They mark sections of a book they think may be erroneous, misleading or unclear. This helps the author discover places in the book that need correction or rewrite and warns other readers of potentially untrustworthy information.

The original authors may rate the paragraphs, and the readers too may so do, with feedback automatically collected. Of course a reader’s rating take precedence for that particular reader.

The reader adjusts low and high limit on each of the six sliders. This temporarily limits what actually gets displayed. To see everything, adjust all six sliders to include 0 to 10 on all six scales. You can change them at any time. The coloured bar indicates the region you want to see.

Recovering Filtered Material

The icons are rather bulky, so you can replace them with coloured dots. You can also make up your own icons if you like.

Here is an even more compact way to do it:

	There is more material available that rates too low on one or more scales to currently display.
	There is more material available that rates too high on one or more scales to currently display.
	There is more material available that rates both too low on one or more scales and too high on one or more other ones to currently display.

Margin Notes

Change Bars

Distribution

Adobe Acrobat

Adobe has invented Digital Edition ebooks. There is nothing special about the content. They are just PDF files. The scheme is about limiting who can view them and for how long. You can use such documents in a lending library. The Acrobat Reader reader honours limits embedded in the file.

Digital Webbooks

Summary

If you don’t surf the Java/Internet wave, it will bury you.

	recommend book⇒1984
		paperback	hardcover	kindle
	ISBN13:	978-0-451-52493-5	978-0-679-41739-2
	ISBN10:	0-451-52493-4	0-679-41739-7	B000FA5U1E
	publisher:	New American Library
	published:	1961-01-01
	by:	George Orwell
amazon.ca amazon.com chapters.indigo.ca powells.com amazon.fr barnesandnoble.com amazon.de amazon.co.uk