Books Shouldn’t Be Dead
This post is part of my Medium blog.
I probably took years off my life writing technical books.
Books were never my day job. I wrote them after work. I stayed up late. I did the work when I should have been sleeping, then went to work and tried to behave like somebody who had slept.
The first book I wrote for O’Reilly was Jakarta Commons Cookbook. I had been involved in the Jakarta and Apache Java communities since the late 1990s, and I had noticed a problem. Programmers were writing software that other programmers needed to use, then explaining it as though the users were compiler authors.
Documentation became a niche for me. I was good at taking something that made sense to the people who built it and trying to explain why it should make sense to anyone else. The cookbook format helped. Problem. Solution. Discussion. It gave the reader a place to start and gave the writer a structure to work inside.
You wrote the book. The publisher printed it. The bookseller sold it. You received royalties. And then the book was done.
That last part was always strange. You could spend a year writing something, revise it until you were sick of looking at the manuscript, and then the book would become a physical object that could not be meaningfully changed. If you found a mistake, it was in the book. If the software changed, the book got older.
The printer had already done its work.
A technical book is not just words. It is examples, screenshots, corrections, and arguments about order. You pour yourself into it, send it to an editor, revise it, and hand it over to a production process that turns it into an object.
Then you promote it a little and move on. The book doesn’t move on. It sits there, fixed in time.
That model made more sense when books were the primary way people learned how to use computers. If you wanted to write Java, you bought the Java book. The book sat next to your computer because Google was not yet the answer to every question.
That world is gone. I’m not nostalgic for all of it. Searching documentation is better than searching an index. A good online reference can be updated in minutes instead of waiting for the next edition.
The book isn’t the problem. The problem is treating it as finished when the subject is still changing.
When I moved into startup work, I started experimenting with a different model. I wrote open-source books, published some of them through Lulu, and gave copies away. One of them became a major source of traffic for the project it documented — roughly a million visits a month, as I remember. The book was no longer only something people bought. It was documentation, distribution, and marketing.
Print-on-demand made this less ridiculous than it had been before. You needed a file and a service that would print a copy when somebody ordered it. The physical book was still useful. It just wasn’t the whole product anymore.
By 2013 or 2014, it was obvious that books could live online. They could point to discussions, examples, and updates that did not fit inside the original manuscript. The book could be a door into a larger body of work instead of a sealed container.
The publishing industry understood some of this. It did not seem to understand all of it.
Even now, a lot of publishing culture still treats the printed book as the event. Someone holds up a physical book on LinkedIn and says, “I wrote a book,” and everybody understands the photograph. I like books. I like the weight of them.
But the artifact is not the argument.
A book should not become less useful because it was printed. It should not be trapped in the version that existed on the day the printer received the file.
Now we have EPUBs, online books, print-on-demand, searchable text, embedded links, and direct publishing. A book can continue to exist after its first release. It means the reader should be able to get the version that exists now, not the version that existed when the production department closed the ticket.
That’s the model I’m using for The Condition Set. The trilogy is finished. But if I find a typo, I want to fix it. If you buy the book directly, you should get the updates.
The printed version can still exist. The EPUB can still exist. The website can still contain related material. None of those formats needs to pretend that it is the only real book.
The book is the work. The file, the paperback, the audio edition, and the website are ways of reaching it.
That distinction matters because the old model was built around scarcity and finality. You wrote the book once. You printed it. You sold it. You moved on. The reader bought the version available at that moment and carried all of its errors forward.
We don’t need to do that anymore.
Books are no longer dead paper objects that become obsolete the moment the box leaves the printer. They can be living works without being unfinished works. They can be stable without being frozen. They can have a publication date without having an expiration date.
The thing you buy should not be the final version of the thing I wrote.
image: /blog/images/books-shouldnt-be-dead.jpg image_alt: "Books Shouldn’t Be Dead"
In Redundant, the first book in The Condition Set trilogy, Rob Coleman runs the FinOps review that names the waste nobody wants to hear about. The numbers don't change. The question is who they get used against.
image: /blog/images/books-shouldnt-be-dead.jpg image_alt: "Books Shouldn’t Be Dead"