Erik's intuition was on the nose then.
Bookstore buyers, individual and enchained, are showing a lukewarm response to our Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web (SW) by Tom Passin. That could be serious since they stand between us and our customers. Without their support we're toast.
Why don't they believe in this book... yet? I can think of only one reason: they remember the buzz surrounding Tim Berners-Lee's Sci Am article published three years ago and they figure, this is old-hat stuff Manning is just getting around to publishing now.
They're wrong--well, partly wrong. We did sign Tom in the afterglow of Tim's article. And, Tom did take forever. So long that Tim finally got the Millenium Prize, and is now too busy to consider writing Tom a foreword. But the interest in the future of the Web is huge and this is the only book that explains it, not to the specialist but to the rest of us.
But there's another reason I know they are wrong. No, it's not because I read it and was so taken by it I was actually sorry to be reaching the end. It's because one day I got a message from Erik Hatcher saying, "... I gotta have this book." You see, this reminded me of the time when we were deciding whether to publish a Hibernate book by some unknown authors called King and Bauer. Our then-star-Java-author responded with, "No way should Manning publish a Hibernate book" (he's now writing for a competitor... :) but Erik told us how it was, that this was one fantastic piece of software and that he was investing in learning it.
Since then Hibernate downloads continued to grow--starting from a small number but increasing 20 to 30 percent per month, sooner or later you get to very large numbers. I have stopped following them but those were the growth rates. Hibernate is a force out there now and expectations are EJB v3 will incorporate many of its features.
Erik's intuition was on the nose then. I'm betting it is again.
PS I got into this musing while reading Eric Bonabeau's HBR article, The Perils of the Imitation Age. Good stuff! The article isn't available on the net and the harcopy single issue costs something like $17. There's a brief description here.
Why don't they believe in this book... yet? I can think of only one reason: they remember the buzz surrounding Tim Berners-Lee's Sci Am article published three years ago and they figure, this is old-hat stuff Manning is just getting around to publishing now.
They're wrong--well, partly wrong. We did sign Tom in the afterglow of Tim's article. And, Tom did take forever. So long that Tim finally got the Millenium Prize, and is now too busy to consider writing Tom a foreword. But the interest in the future of the Web is huge and this is the only book that explains it, not to the specialist but to the rest of us.
But there's another reason I know they are wrong. No, it's not because I read it and was so taken by it I was actually sorry to be reaching the end. It's because one day I got a message from Erik Hatcher saying, "... I gotta have this book." You see, this reminded me of the time when we were deciding whether to publish a Hibernate book by some unknown authors called King and Bauer. Our then-star-Java-author responded with, "No way should Manning publish a Hibernate book" (he's now writing for a competitor... :) but Erik told us how it was, that this was one fantastic piece of software and that he was investing in learning it.
Since then Hibernate downloads continued to grow--starting from a small number but increasing 20 to 30 percent per month, sooner or later you get to very large numbers. I have stopped following them but those were the growth rates. Hibernate is a force out there now and expectations are EJB v3 will incorporate many of its features.
Erik's intuition was on the nose then. I'm betting it is again.
PS I got into this musing while reading Eric Bonabeau's HBR article, The Perils of the Imitation Age. Good stuff! The article isn't available on the net and the harcopy single issue costs something like $17. There's a brief description here.
Comments
Alex wrote:
Glad you were taken with the book; it does given you a more "this is what it is all about" view than any other source out there. I'm wondering what you mean by "luke-warm", as opposed to people who in the past bought dead-trees compared to people who now buy the eBook version instead? BTW, I asked locally here in Canberra/Australia about Mannings books in general in the No. 1 computer book shop, and they had none. Do you have any clues to the Aussie/capitol market?
