Jack: Kudos for carrying on! Having a contract canceled after putting a lot of work into it must be a bummer...
Personally I'm not buying many paper books any more, so the e-book version is preferable for me, so take this with a grain of salt.. but make the paper version spiral bound, _please_. I wish every reference book or cookbook or whatever, really anything I have to look at when my fingers are busy doing something else was spiral bound.... Best Erick On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 7:14 PM, Jack Krupansky <j...@basetechnology.com> wrote: > To those of you who may have heard about the Lucene/Solr book that I and two > others are writing on Lucene and Solr, some bad and good news. The bad news: > The book contract with O’Reilly has been canceled. The good news: I’m going > to proceed with self-publishing (possibly on Lulu or even Amazon) a somewhat > reduced scope Solr-only Reference Guide (with hints of Lucene). The scope of > the previous effort was too great, even for O’Reilly – a book larger than 800 > pages (or even 600) that was heavy on reference and lighter on “guide” just > wasn’t fitting in with their traditional “guide” model. In truth, Solr is > just too complex for a simple guide that covers it all, let alone Lucene as > well. > > I’ll announce more details in the coming weeks, but I expect to publish an > e-book-only version of the book, focused on Solr reference (and plenty of > guide as well), possibly on Lulu, plus eventually publish 4-8 individual > print volumes for people who really want the paper. One model I may pursue is > to offer the current, incomplete, raw, rough, draft as a $7.99 e-book, with > the promise of updates every two weeks or a month as new and revised content > and new releases of Solr become available. Maybe the individual e-book > volumes would be $2 or $3. These are just preliminary ideas. Feel free to let > me know what seems reasonable or excessive. > > For paper: Do people really want perfect bound, or would you prefer spiral > bound that lies flat and folds back easily? I suppose we could offer both – > which should be considered “premium”? > > I’ll announce more details next week. The immediate goal will be to get the > “raw rough draft” available to everyone ASAP. > > For those of you who have been early reviewers – your effort will not have > been in vain. I have all your comments and will address them over the next > month or two or three. > > Just for some clarity, the existing Solr Wiki and even the recent > contribution of the LucidWorks Solr Reference to Apache really are still > great contributions to general knowledge about Solr, but the book is intended > to go much deeper into detail, especially with loads of examples and a lot > more narrative guide. For example, the book has a complete list of the > analyzer filters, each with a clean one-liner description. Ditto for every > parameter (although I would note that the LucidWorks Solr Reference does a > decent job of that as well.) Maybe, eventually, everything in the book COULD > (and will) be integrated into the standard Solr doc, but until then, a > single, integrated reference really is sorely needed. And, the book has a lot > of narrative guide and walking through examples as well. Over time, I’m sure > both will evolve. And just to be clear, the book is not a simple repurposing > of the Solr wiki content – EVERY description of everything has been written > fresh, from scratch. So, for example, analyzer filters get both short > one-liner summary descriptions as well as more detailed descriptions, plus > formal attribute specifications and numerous examples, including sample input > and outputs (the LucidWorks Solr Reference does a better job with examples as > well.) > > The book has been written in parallel with branch_4x and that will continue. > > -- Jack Krupansky
