On Tue, 2007-10-16 at 18:36 -0600, Matt Gushee wrote:

> As for Jon's idea, sure, great! But I wonder if any major publisher 
> would take it on. After all, O'Reilly *has* an introductory OCaml book; 
> it would need to be updated and translated, but that's still much easier 
> than creating a new one. Yet they don't seem interested in doing that. 
> So some brave soul might have to self-publish something.

Well, Jon already has published something. I think the days
of paper publishers struggling to get ANY content at all are over.
Large numbers of well respected mathematics titles are now permanently
out of print. Despite the fact that printing is now extremely cheap,
publishing is all about marketing and large scale sales: that's
where the main costs are.

For any kind of title with a small market, distributing paper
via major channels just isn't worth it.

Jon has done this the right way. If I were to write an Ocaml
book now I'd be asking Jon to publish it.

-- 
John Skaller <skaller at users dot sf dot net>
Felix, successor to C++: http://felix.sf.net