Blog Books Pro or Con?

Christian Crumlish

I was talking to Bill Pollock, the "maverick" publisher of No Starch Press yesterday over lunch in Potrero Hill, pitching him a few titles that some of my author clients would like to write and idly mentioning a few of my own book ideas. When we got to discussing blog books, he said (as many others have) that he doesn't see the need for such a book. Now, Bill runs on passion. If he cares about something, he'll publish on it and more than likely have success with it, but if he's not into something, then he may accept that it might be a good idea, but he's not going to go out on a limb about.

He did mention that he's seen many book proposals on blogs or blogging lately (and I think that's probably true of a lot of computer-book and technology publishers). For me, this is kind of frustrating. Typically you bring an idea to publishers and they've never heard of it, don't see anyone else publishing on it, don't get it and don't see why there needs to be a book. Six months later the reason for rejecting the proposal is the opposite: Too many publishers are doing books like this, the areas is overpublished, we've got our own book in the works, etc.

Now, to be fair, my ideas are only semi-baked. I'm not that interested in doing a technical how to or survey (like the O'Reilly Blogging Essentials title) and I'm only somewhat interested in doing a think piece like the Perseus book. Having done a lot of content-management consulting, for startups and Fortune 500 companies, I do feel that the blogging phenomenon represents a mid-level streamlined CMS solution just sitting there. I'm not totally bought into the Knowledge Log concept, but just bridging the gap between lame custom-built forms-driven content admin pages and six or seven figure enterprise systems such as Documentum or Interwoven Teamsite looks like a business opportunity to me.

Then there's the noncommercial side of things. Blogs seem to have inherited all the oomph of the pre-commerce web. And blogging touches on so many other issues these days—it's almost like a surrogate for the Internet itself, circa 1995.

Then, on the purely pragmatic side of things, I can easily imagine a good 250-300 page book just on MovableType (or, for that matter, on Radio Userland). Maybe that book is already in the works. If I don't write it, maybe I'll review it.

This random screed brought to you after perusing my News page and coming across this:

A couple of weeks ago I said I don't understand books about weblogs. Double-click. How do you write about a book about the Web if it isn't on the Web? All you can do is write a very short review, unless you want to try to explain what the book is saying. Well, writing for weblogs doesn't work that way. I say what I have to say and link to the source so you can read for yourself exactly what they're saying, not my paraphrasing of it. It's lame for a book about weblogs to not be on the Web. If all I can do is link to a page where you can buy the book, well, okay, I'll do that once or twice, but if it's on the Web, and indexed by search engines, it can come up over and over. So I think the BlogRoots folks did the right thing. Their book will be studied, examined, probed, questioned and vetted by the weblog community, as they release chapters on a regular basis over the coming weeks. Will their book sell? We'll find out when it's published. I'll buy a copy to support the idea of books being dual-published on the Web and in print. It's a good idea, in general, but it's essential for books about the Web. [Scripting News]