discuss: My obsolete HOWTOs being sold as a book
Subject:
Re: My obsolete HOWTOs being sold as a book
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
19 Feb 2001 07:05:14 -0000
Message-Id: <20010218230508.A520@localhost>
> On Sat, Feb 17, 2001 at 12:58:23PM -0800, David Lawyer wrote:
> > I recently found out that I'm a joint author of a book published in
> > Jan. 1999 that is still being sold. It's called "Linux Modem and
> > Serial Communications". The howtos it's based on are very obsolete
> > and people that buy such a book are being cheated.
> >
[snip]
On Sun, Feb 18, 2001 at 04:03:20PM -0500, David Merrill wrote:
> I am going to write a paragraph about this for my next LWN submission.
> Does anybody know whether other publishers are doing this, or is it an
> isolated problem?
>
> David, anything in particular you would like me to say? Otherwise, I'm
> just going to make it an advisement that we've discovered (at least?)
> one publisher is selling out of date documentation and this is
> something users should be careful to avoid. I think many people don't
> realize how often the documentation is updated, especially since we
> don't have any good mechanisms in place (yet) for easily keeping your
> system current. I'm not going to name the publisher - even if I knew
> who it was.
>
> Where is the best place for me to find a list of the docs currently
> available in hard copy?
Don't know. Some are listed on LDP's homepage. (Should they be there
or should they be on a less conspicuous LDP page?) The way I found my
HOWTOs in print was to go to amazon.com and type in my name for an
author search. I didn't really expect to see any results but it gave
two hits, one of which was the out-of-date one. For the out-of-date
modem-serial book I'm only a joint author (with 2 others) but I think
most of the book is my and Greg Hankins. They failed to list Greg
Hankins as an author although most of the Serial-HOWTO at that time
was by him (I had just taken it over as the new maintainer). My other
book is Text-Terminal-HOWTO which is more recent. I wasn't notified
about the publication of these but there was no requirement to do so.
I'm now at amazon.com and they claim the average customer rating is
4.0 out of 5 stars (for the modem-serial book). Perhaps this rating
is from 2 years ago ?? A rating of 4 stars is about what textbooks
used in top universities get. Amazon also presents a favorable review
written on April 26, 2000 by someone from Central America.
> I would like to put that list in the news also, with links to the
> publishers. We should be encouraging publishers to print the
> documents as long as they do it responsibly, and listing the
> reputable publishers we know of would be a good way of doing that,
> while simultaneously steering people away from the more shady folks.
David Lawyer
