Media Center Development Book Ideas

Look, I'm not always the best at really finishing things, partially because I'm trying to slot everything in around the normal work/eat/play/family thing AND still try to make some Media Center software at the same time.

So I'm going to offer some alternatives here in a poll. Vote on what you think would work for you...

   [NOTE: All price estimates are in AUD - Australian Dollars]

   You can vote for a print book. This will be the most expensive option, and take the longest until it is delivered. It's also far from guaranteed to every happen. You're looking at a fairly high price for this once the day is done - I'd assume around the $80-100 mark, although I've never published a book before so I just don't know.

   You can vote for a complete, polished PDF book. This is a cheaper options sitting at around the $40-50 mark. It will still take me quite some time to finish, (if ever!) but you'll have access to it as soon as it's done.

   Finally, there's the "Draft Access" option. The idea here is that you pay a smaller amount - in the area of $20-$25 perhaps - and you can download the latest draft. This draft is regularly updated and you can always download the next edition. This means you have access to the information very quickly, and even if I don't ever get the book 100% polished and clean, you'll have access to a LOT of information.

   As an indication and as mentioned before, the current draft is 150 pages long and I've only just started really walking through a real application scenario - I've structured the book differently to the blog, so it covers all of the concepts of basic MCML in much greater depth before I start to deal with any integration with your C# code. However, it will still have a 'step-by-step' to making a program, and it will include a number of new tricks and facts that I've discovered since writing the original blog posts.

   Anyway, tick off your vote. If there isn't enough interest in the draft option, I'll skip it. But I thought it was an interesting way of getting you a book that may take quite some time to complete.

Why can't you offer it in multiple formats?  You could even make it so if someone buys the print version they get access to the updated .pdf over time.  Also IMHO $80-100 for the print version seems a little high.  I think you should try to keep the print version closer to the <$50 range  (same range as many of the Microsoft Step by Step books).

As soon as you go down the publisher route it slows the whole thing down and complicates things with contracts etc so maybe Steven's thinking is to keep it simple and open and self publish

A PDF book on Media Center Development I love this idea, if you could start with “Hello world” I think is a good place to start

 

Ian is correct if go down the publisher route it will get complicated.

I was as the MS Summit and they a session on publishing PC books, one think you may already know there is little or no money made from this, but if you doing this for fun or help people then that’s great.