Re: Book: can we incorporate O'Reilly's edits?

Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:
> O'Reilly made a bunch of edits without telling us, and we had to
> manually discover them and recreate them in the source. It was ugly. :-(

That's painfully ironic, given the systems and techniques that the book
describes. :-)

> After the fact, it looks like they're able to give us some kind of
> 'batch' description of the changes, but only if we push them a bit.
> There's been a bit of discussion about it, but we never pushed for it
> very hard.

I feel that doing so would be only fair to us, after we have gone to
great lengths to prepare the book in a manner acceptable to them. Doing
so would save them work if they ever publish a second edition.

I accept that O'Reilly might not want to give us things like the index,
as that is a significant piece of their own private work that can help
to give their printed version value over others. But I would really
appreciate getting back their multiple minor edits for things like
language style and mark-up.

> In the meantime, feel free to manually port stuff from hardcopy to
> source, if you notice things...

Thanks. I may port some of the simple differences that I notice.
However, they have made, for example, an editorial decision to remove
the use of "<emphasis>" in several places where it was apparently
unnecessarily strong, and it would be laborious to go through the whole
book searching for those.

The thing is, I respect their judgement in such matters. I don't think
it's a matter of them changing it to suit themselves, and us wanting to
keep it the way we have it and like it.

Would you be willing to give them another little push? Quote me if you
like.

- Julian

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Received on Thu Oct 21 15:22:34 2004