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Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Books are cast in stone, ebooks are wet clay

I have been listening to This Week in Google with Leo Laporte, Gina Trapani and Jeff Jarvis. Jeff Jarvis was talking about books in the old days of scribes and moveable type. He said that errors used to occur and so errata became a common way for correcting mistakes.

It seems to me that books and manuals like the ones I write, are not designed to be updated each month. Once the books have been proof read and sent to the printer, they will not be updated.

At the moment, I am updating my four major tutorial manuals so they will be ready for the next update to Vectorworks. Once completed, they will not be updated for another year. In this way these manuals are cast in stone (not easy to update).

Ebooks can be updated easily, and downloaded when you want them. If I make an error in an ebook, I can correct it and make it available to everyone. In this way an ebook is not cast in stone, it is wet clay (easily editable).


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