Books too big to publish (was: Great Young Hope?) - rec.arts.sf.written

Message from discussion Books too big to publish (was: Great Young Hope?)

Mark Atwood

View profile

More options Oct 5 2006, 9:49 pm

Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written

From: Mark Atwood <m...@mark.atwood.name>

Date: Fri, 06 Oct 2006 01:49:24 GMT

Local: Thurs, Oct 5 2006 9:49 pm

Subject: Re: Books too big to publish (was: Great Young Hope?)

  Reply to author
  |
  Forward
  | Print
  | View thread
  | Show original
  | Report this message
  | Find messages by this author
  

Andrew Wheeler <acwhe...@optonline.com> writes:

> Some of that is writers who turned in things longer than the contracts
> called for, and some are cases where the market conditions changed
> between contract and final manuscript. Some others apparently are cases
> where the publisher didn't think it would be a big deal when they
> contracted the book -- and it became a big deal later.

An interesting example is "The New C Standard: An Economic and
Cultural Commentary". The book was contracted, and when the author,
Derek Jones <je...@knosof.co.uk>, turned in the manuscript to
Addison-Wesley, they decided it was unpublishable due to size.

| Apart from being initially very upset with them I don't hold
| anything against Addison Wesley. I appreciate that the book has an
| unusual format and is rather large - I did not know until almost
| crunch time that it was on the limit of what non specialist
| printers can handle, in terms of number of pages-

The book is an analysis of every single word in the ANSI C99 standard,
sentence by sentence (all 2022 sentences), with references to all the
committee discussions and decisions and history and ... etc etc.

He got to keep the advance, and the rights, and so he put it up for
free on the net. I printed out a double-sided copy (1616 pages, 808
sheets, two packs of paper), and it's over six inches thick.

http://www.knosof.co.uk/cbook/cbook.html
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/08/1245232
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=24092

--
Mark Atwood When you do things right, people won't be sure
m...@mark.atwood.name you've done anything at all.
http://mark.atwood.name/ http://fallenpegasus.livejournal.com/

Reply to author Forward