Philip Greenspun is having trouble publishing his latest book:
Two publishers have approached us wanting to do a hardcopy version of http://philip.greenspun.com/internet-application-workbook/ (the textbook for 6.171 at MIT). Both have lost interest when we said that we wanted to keep the text online. To a traditional publisher the Web is a place for stuff that isn’t quite good enough to sell. If the manuscript ever does become good enough to sell it should be made inaccessible to anyone who isn’t able to scratch up the $40. An amusing side note is that one of the publishers who felt that it was critical to make every last dime possible from the sale of our book was Microsoft Press, whose working capital is $40 billion.
I think O’Reilly would be a perfect match for a philg book. And I bet they’d let him keep his book online, just as he did Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing.
