This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by David Heinemeier Hansson. Original Post: Beta books: Release early and often Feed Title: Loud Thinking Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/LoudThinking Feed Description: All about the full-stack, web-framework Rails for Ruby and on putting it to good effect with Basecamp Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by David Heinemeier Hansson Latest Posts From Loud Thinking

It's been interesting to watch the market lag to satisfy the huge demand for more Rails documentation. Once the publishers recognize there's a market, it easily takes 6 months (or longer!) before the final book is ready in the stores. That's a terribly long wait and an abrupt switch from "no books" to "plenty of books". It's bad for users that want better documentation today and its bad for publishers that wants to sell that documentation.

Now that I actually have some say in the production of one of these books, I've been pushing Dave Thomas to recognize this. And lo and behold, I've been making progress. Basically, the content for Agile Web Development with Rails is all done. Some 500+ pages.

But of course that doesn't mean that the book is done. There's editing, second readings, typesetting, printing, and more. All of this post production work makes a release around August feasible. AUGUST?!? That was what I was thinking. When you're used to the web, the book publishing business can appear utterly arcane.

So. Instead of letting a ton of high quality, really important documentation sit on the shelf for two and a half months while the machinery of publishing is ready to deliver, we'll be trying to get the book out in digital form for those that really want it. Basically, we'll be playing release early, release often with the book while it undergoes the last mile.

And I think a lot of people are interested in making that trade. Getting content early, recognizing it's a beta release that may have spelling mistakes or even a few bugs. Especially so when the choice is between no book and a 90% done book. Then getting the final tome when that's done too.

Dave has all the common reservations to that as a publisher, naturally. Will people look down upon the unfinished work? Will they pirate it like mad? Will the final product be uninteresting when it finally arrives? I don't think so. Rails is still enough of "labour of love" kind of thing for the people into it that I think they're smart enough to recognize that this model only works if those fears are brought to shame.

Let's blaze the trail with this one. Show publishers that we want the quality writers that they all have lured in to start delivering according to the open source model. There are so many interesting topics that could use a flow of high quality, commercially-backed documentation production today. Not 6 months from now.