Future of Tech Books: Sizzle and Steak
I have a pet theory that tech publishing is going to become a personality driven part of the book business the same way cookbook publishing has. Microwave ovens and online recipe databases should have killed off the cookbook long ago. It has survived. Reading about boiling an egg is about as exciting as Windows Vista in 25 Minutes a Day. There is still a place for that, but bring on the blockbusters and the celebrities. Being a foodie isn’t that different than being a techie, so why can’t we sell it to the mainstream as a lifestyle?
Sadly I can’t convince my friends that this is likely or possible. They find the whole notion of tech celebrity distasteful — something about the hacker ethos. And apparently a ‘timeless tech book’ is a contradiction in terms.
I admit I have no supporting evidence for my position.
Perhaps that’s why I was emboldened by tech author Charles Petzold’s blog entry from a year ago last month. He talks about the value of an author finding a logical through line for a topic by writing about it in book form. He talks about writing tech books that last.
It turns out, I was getting my hopes up. Like me, Amy Hoy caught up with Petzold’s post a year later. In her words she “neatly eviscerated this aggravatingly fact-free essay” in her post at Slash7. Here is a sample of her tone:
I don’t know about you, dear reader, but since Mr Petzold is being all colloquial, I think I will be, too. I’ve read a lot of programming books. I’ve tried to learn programming of various types from several, back before I could program very well in anything at all. I found every last one to be too boring, dry, ridiculously narrow-sighted, and not providing the grand overview and synthesis that a book can provide but a free web tutorial does not. They typically feature numerous holes, conceptual leaps without warning, mistakes, bugs, and omissions that make the Internet, and the helpful people on it, a necessary companion to start with… and if the companion is free, why not just bypass the thing causing you the pain to begin with?
Hoy points out that quality writing on timely, in-demand topics still sells — just maybe not in book form. Publishers need to go where their readers are. Hoy says publishers and writers need to accept that fact and move on, “Left brain books — and books for experienced programmers — are out.”
I actually don’t think Petzold and Hoy are that far apart. Both want tech writing to be vibrant and valuable. Hoy just wants Petzold to stop complaining so much. Hear hear to reinventing the tech book business. I am all for faster, better, and sometimes cheaper. And I am willing to concede that we don’t have to invent the Gordon-Ramsay of tech to get there, although that reality show would still be fun.
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