--- Paul E Condon <pecondon@peakpeak.com> wrote:
1) Look at http://www.debian.org/doc/
2) The competition at debian.org pretty much kills
the dead tree book market, IMHO.
I agree with (1) but not with (2).
Firstly, I'd pay to get some of the material on
http://www.debian.org/doc/ in the form of a printed,
bound book; a book is more convenient to read and
tires the eyes less.
Secondly, the printed-book market is competitive.
Write something unclear or badly organised, and your
book probably won't get published, or if it does, it
won't sell. That applies much less to free, on-line
documentation because there's always a shortage of it
- most programmers don't like to write documentation.
So the general standard of organisation and clarity
tends to be higher in printed books than on
http://www.debian.org/doc/. This is not to denigrate
the fine job that people have done on that resource,
of course; I'm just pointing out that the constraints
under which they work are different from those of the
printed book market.