The Average Joe: In Search of the Perfect Computer Book

Joe Wikert, publisher of The Red Couch, comments on errata in computer books. It’s good to hear these kinds of thing from a publisher. There’s very little that’s more frustrating than going through a programming book, finding a problem with the code, and not being able to find a correction to it. When you’re not familiar wth a language it can take hours upon hours to find the bug, and given the simplicity of most progamming excercises in programming books it’s rarely worth the time. Not to mention the fact that even if you can get the example working, you can’t be sure that your method was a “best practices” solution.

Given the technology available to book publishers these days, I’d say that not including an errata page on the book’s site is tantamount to knowingly publishing falsehoods or inaccurate information. It’s so simple to correct these errors on the web that publishers who are unwilling to correct their errors should suffer those same consequences as well, although I doubt that Joe would agree.

Joe hits upon a great idea for dealing with this problem; offering RSS feeds for errata information, in addition to a static page. But why stop there? Why not a blog about the book? Maybe it wouldn’t be updated all the frequently, but who cares? Or what about a book wiki where consumers can post questions or clarifications? That would be a value-added service. What about (in books where the entire content is supplied in pdf format on a cd-rom) republishing the pdfs of chapters containing errata every so often, so that book owners can download complete versions with the corrections?

Here’s a novel idea. What about treating software books like software itself, complete with a support contract of sorts? Buy the book and get all the errata corrected in whatever medium is most appropriate. Pay a little more (and I mean a little - not many people would be willing to pay much) and get updated chapters when written. I think this would work especially well with books whose content stays current for the most part but where certain sections become outdated. That’s not an error - it’s the passage of time - but it may not suggest a whole new edition. The publisher saves the expense of publishing a completely new print version of the book and passes those savings on to the readers. That something I could get behind.

And Joe, I agree completely with Robert Scoble when he writes that The Average Joe isn’t a great blog name. I’d have been unlikely to stop for long if it wasn’t for his recommendation, but I’m glad he did reccomend it. House of the Hanged Man might not be a great name either. Scoble, any suggestions?