Science fiction author Walter John Williams wants to get his out of print work online so you can read it: To this end, I embarked upon a Cunning Plan. I discovered that my work had been pirated, and was available for free on BitTorrent sites located in the many outlaw server dens of former Marxist…
Read More "Pirate my books, please"A few weeks back, Dave Birch asked me if I’d publish my next book myself. I don’t think I would. I’m really happy with Karen Gettman and Jessica Goldstein at Addison Wesley, and I’ve convinced my co-authors for my next book that we should have a discussion about publishers. So why am I happy with…
Read More Would I self-publish?The Paper of Record has a hilarious article, “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?” which asks important questions about what Those Darn Kids are doing — spending their time using a mixture of hot media and cold media delivered to them over the internets. I’ll get right to the point before I start ridiculing…
Read More This Is Not Writing; You Are Not ReadingTo start from the obvious, book publishers are companies, hoping to make money from the books they publish. If you’d like your book to be on this illustrious list, you need an idea for a book that will sell. This post isn’t about how to come up with the idea, it’s about how to sell…
Read More Writing a book: The ProposalWhen Andrew and I started writing The New School, we both lived in Atlanta, only a few miles apart. We regularly met for beer or coffee to review drafts. After I moved to Seattle, our working process changed a lot. I wanted to talk both about the tools we used, and our writing process. We…
Read More Writing a book: technical tools & collaborationThere’s a great (long) post by Baron Schwartz, “What is it like to write a technical book?” by the lead author of “High Performance MySQL.” There’s a lot of great content about the process and all the but I wanted to respond to this one bit: I can’t tell you how many times I asked…
Read More How much work is writing a book?Gary McGraw says buy it for the cover: The New School of Information Security is a book worth buying for the cover alone. I know of no other computer security book with a Kandinski on the front. Even though I know Adam Shostack from way back (and never could have predicted that he would become…
Read More More New School ReviewsThere’s a fascinating article in the New York Times, “At Bear Stearns, Meet the New Boss.” What makes it fascinating is the human emotion displayed: “In this room are people who have built this firm and lost a lot, our fortunes,” one Bear executive said to Mr. Dimon with anger in his voice. “What will…
Read More The Principal-Agent Problem in SecurityAndre Gironda writes “Implications of The New School:” Additionally, the authors immediately begin the book with how they are going to write it — how they don’t reference anything in great detail, but that the endnotes should suffice. This also put me off a bit… that is — until I got to the endnotes! Certainly…
Read More First in-depth reviewOur editor says that the Safari e-book edition of The New School is now available. Hardcopies should be out in a week or so. Jon Pincus gives us a mention in his long article “Indeed! The Economist on “computer science as a social science”” and comments that we “explicitly include discussions of diversity in the…
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