apress – Made by Mikal

Color ebook!

Post author:mikal
Post published:June 30, 2006
Post category:Imagemagick

By far the most consistent criticism of The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick has been that the sample images need to be in color. I would have to agree with this point, which is why I am delighted that Apress took the time to go back around the production process and produce a version of the ebook with color images. It's cool that they were willing to put in the effort, and not only that, they're giving anyone who has purchased the ebook to date a free upgrade. Even better, now if you buy the printed book on Amazon, you get the color ebook for free! I have a limited number of color ebooks to give away, so if you're interested please leave a comment and explain why you'd like one.

State of the computing book market

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 3, 2006
Post category:Link

Tim O'Reilly's examination of the state of the book market: comes in three parts. It makes some interesting points. Gary Cornell has started a response which is also worth a read.

The Apress page for the book

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 15, 2005
Post category:Imagemagick

I just noticed that Apress has a page up for the book as well. Perhaps I should stop pointing these things out, but I find it exciting. There's something deeply weird about reading about yourself though.

Trying out the Apress e-book system

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 8, 2005
Post category:Books

Full disclosure: I am currently writing a book for Apress. As an Apress author Apress asked me to check out the Apress e-book online catalog thingie. They threw in a free e-book as an incentive, so I thought I should give it a try. I've done a fair few book reviews for AUUG / Woodslane over the last couple of years, so it seemed like a good idea to look further into this e-book thing anyway. Especially as I have a garage full of books that I occasionally need as references, but don't have the space to store in the house, especially with two small kids who like to draw in books around. So, I picked a book in their online catalog, and said I'd like to buy it. I entered the discount code, and was good to go until they noticed that I didn't have an online account in their system. So, I had to stop my "purchase" and make one. Which meant that my place was lost in the purchase, as I had to wait for a confirmation email to arrive, and then click on a link in that email which didn't have the stage I was up…

Some details about the publication process

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 8, 2005
Post category:Imagemagick

Pascal asked in the comments to a previous post about the book about how I was going about writing the book and how the publication process works. It's a good question, and something I meant to cover here anyway, so now seems like a good time. I'll start from the beginning with a brief summary of how I got started with this writing thing. I started off by writing a number of articles for IBM DeveloperWorks. DeveloperWorks are actually really good to work with, all I did to start writing from them was fill in the proposal web form within a couple of hours we'd sorted out what was happening, and off we went. The ImageMagick articles I wrote turned out to be quite popular with the ImageMagick people. I suspect that's why the editor for Apress, a lovely guy named Matt contacted me. He pitched the book to me, and I was originally hesitant. He spent a fair bit of time (a month?) discussing the project with me, and I ended up deciding that because it's fairly closely aligned with the imaging work I'm doing for my PhD, I ended up saying yes. Along the way I wrote a…