By Jason Levitt
March 17, 1997

Secrets Of The Internet Zone Unleashed For Dummies
Where Do All These Internet Books Come From?

Do you recall when you first heard about "push" technology? It probably happened the day after you heard about Dynamic HTML , or the day before you heard about LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol). What I'm getting at here is that Internet technology is coming at us from all angles and it's getting increasingly hard to keep up. Books are still the best resource, butttt..........have you taken a trip to your local mega-bookstore lately? Like trashy romance novels, it seems there has always been a market for poorly written computer books. It seems like a good one-eighth of the floor space in most major bookstore chains is devoted to books about computer technology, and books about the Internet make up a good portion of all those computer books. Proportionally, though, the number of cruddy computer books seems to have gotten higher. I used to wonder, where do all these books come from and how do they get written so quickly? Why are they so big? Why are so many of them of such poor quality? Does anybody make any money with this stuff?

Then, I wrote one.

Not a cruddy one, just an average one, co-authored with my friend, Kamran Husain. It's called The JavaScript Developer's Resource, and it was published by Prentice-Hall in November of last year (if you don't find it in your local bookstore, complain loudly to the store manager). While negotiating the contract and writing the book, I discovered some answers about the book-publishing business and a possible solution that might raise the quality of the books.

Computer Books Are BIG
When Kamran and I were negotiating our book contract, we told the publisher that we could write the book in 250 pages. That's all the space we'd need to do a thorough treatment of the subject. The publisher, however, said we'd have to deliver at least 350 pages, preferably more (we ended up with 400 pages by adding a reference manual to the back of the book). I'll give you a moment to guess why.

The reason? The thicker the spine, the easier it is to see the book when it sits on the store shelves. You see, studies have shown that lots of computer books are sold to people who just walk in to a bookstore looking for a book, any book, on a particular subject. If the spine of the book is thick, they'll more likely see it than if it's thin. Of course, the title has to be in the largest possible type size.

Short Memories
Computer books have to be timely. Once a computer book is released, you'll be lucky if the content is still usable six months later. Internet books date particularly fast. They last, on average, about three months. What this means is that publishers have to get books to market as fast as possible in order to be competitive. Typically, the first books on a new subject that appear on the shelves are the ones that sell best. So pu blishers rush to get their first books out on a new subject, often at the expense of book quality. In order to get books to market as fast as possible, book publishers have come up with some time-saving techniques. Here are a few of them:

• Bulk Authoring:
  One popular way publishers get books to market fast is to have a team of writers, perhaps each person writing one chapter, collaborate on a book. The problem with this approach is that the resulting books often lack cohesion.

• Style Templates:
  Look closely at the layout of your favorite computer books. You'll notice that they usually have a canonical layout. For my book, the publisher provided templates that were made using Microsoft Word macros. My co-author and I used these templates to write the book so that our copy could be placed into production as quickly as possible. Style templates can help readability, but they also limit the creativity and design op tions of the book.

• On-The-Fly Production:
  With some books, the author will deliver each chapter, which is then moved through the production department as quickly as possible. The author is not allowed to go back and change chapters previously submitted. Books do get through production faster this way, but the book's overall feel may suffer because the author can't correct logic or design errors made in previously submitted chapters.

Beware The First Releases (and a solution I'd like to see)
If you're like me, you're always on the lookout for a good reference book for your computer library. The problem is finding a truly good book. The previously mentioned techniques help speed the publishing process, but often at the expense of quality. Some of the books I've seen recently look like they were written in four weeks by someone who simply paraphrased existing user documentation. The fact is that some computer book s are written in four weeks by someone who simply paraphrased existing user documentation, though 16-24 weeks is more typical. The rush to be "first" is to blame. One reason these rushed books sometimes sell pretty well is that it's often hard for novice users to know that a computer book on a complex subject isn't offering anything new.

What I think would really help the quality of computer books is to have a small newspaper and an online Web site dedicated to reviews of new computer books and have the newspaper available at major bookstores. It would be nice if the largest bookstores could get together and subsidize the newspaper. I think if consumers had such a publication available, they could make more informed purchasing decisions, and the more poorly written computer books would stop selling and wouldn't be financially worthwhile any more.

Addendum
To be frank, my book is starting to get pretty old and may not be selling well enough for me to bother doin g a second edition. I may still write another book, however. The JavaScript Developer's Resource was my first book, but it was my co-author's eighth (one of which was a best-seller). After calculating the amount of time he spent writing books, he's decided it hasn't been worth it. He figures that, overall, he's made about $10 an hour off all his books, and that was a lot of hours he might of used to make a lot more money at his usual freelance computer-engineer gig.

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