My advice - buy every NETMF/Gadgeteer book that is published whether it’s good or not. I sent an idea for a NETMF related book to MS Press last year and this is the response I got. As you can see from their response, unless we can manage to get sales up in the topic then it’s very unlikely that there will ever be many options on the topic.
[quote]Thank you for submitting this query. As it happens, I was the acquisitions editor for an earlier MF book published by Microsoft Press about 4-1/2 years ago. That book was supported by the Microsoft product group, where its lead author was the guy in charge of the Micro Framework. Long story short, we have not yet sold a thousand books – in an industry where the breakeven point for even non-traditional projects is in the low thousands. We simply have no capacity to make another foray into this area, as we get ready for new versions of Windows and Visual Studio.
You might be able to interest another publisher in this idea (though I dont think the Kuhner book from Apress was a particularly successful title, either). If your blog is getting attention, frankly, I would run with that, build a reputation, and then consider self-publishing. This is a niche topic that might repay the effort necessary to create eBooks, with print-on-demand, if you can undertake the marketing and promotion to the audience you build. Having books in brick-and-mortar stores is largely irrelevant to a topic like this because discoverability is so much better online.[/quote]
Yup…having written a few books, I totally get that. And I agree with the acquisitions editor that this may be a place where straight ebook and/or self-publishing would make sense.
Might be an opportunity for a collaborative effort…
The quote from the publisher is very interesting. He’s actually suggesting that you self-publish!
I’m curious, if you wanted to self-publish to Kindle format is that even possible?
Is it an open standard? Are there editors available? Do you have to pay a fee to Amazon?
There’s a certain amount of irony that Amazon’s page about self-publishing doesn’t render properly on a monitor in portrait mode.
That quibble aside, I do find the inclusion of HTML5/CSS support in Kindle format 8 interesting. Opens up the possibility of publishing a work on the web, but also packaging as an ebook for folks who are interested in that format and/or portability for offline reading.
Also makes it potentially pretty easy to create a long-running blog series, and later convert it to ebook format, which I believe is likely how this book originated (Jeff Blankenburg is a fellow Microsoft developer evangelist, so I can ping him for more info, if you’d like):
I wonder how much HTML5 the Kindle supports. Is it just formatting tags or canvas and all the new media tags. The big advantage I see of a digital format is having the ability to include interactive material (charts, animations, videos, Fiddler???). I haven’t seen any examples of books like this yet but then again I’m not a Kindle user yet… I guess the real question is does Kindle support javascript since that’s what would really be necessary to make that all work.
I very much doubt that the Kindle format supports any of those interactive formats, as that would limit the potential audience to Kindle Fire or Kindle apps for PC, etc. that are displayed on screens that can update quickly enough for canvas, video, etc.
Without having looked very deeply, I’m under the impression that HTML/CSS is primarily intended for markup and styling, not for interactivity. A quick glance at their guidelines confirms this:
If you check Appendix A, it lists the supported HTML tags (as well as CSS selectors/attributes/etc.), which does not include Canvas. Interestingly, it does appear to support
Looking at the tag list, I think the biggest HTML5 feature that’s important for this kind of self-publishing are the semantic markup tags (header, footer, section, article, aside, etc.).
BTW - I dropped an email to Jeff, who said that working with KDP was pretty easy.
I pretty much finished to book now (except for some details I don’t need at the moment).
I think it covers the basics very well and it’s more useful than the "Embedded Programming with Microsoft .NET Micro Framework (http://tinyurl.com/7n46fm7) I’ve been reading before. I won’t be getting the print version though as I don’t think it has much use as a reference manual once you got completely through it.
The only thing I was missing was I2C as they only covered uart and SPI, but I2C might be too much vendor specific to write a general howto.
I really enjoyed the reading experience on the Kindle reader except for the source code which obviously didn’t format very well, but then again in most print books source code isn’t much better. I’ve been reading a chapter during transport to/from work and then went through the examples once I was back home.
Has anyone tried this one yet? (http://tinyurl.com/7qek9y7) Net Micro Framework from ßscript publishing? I’m thinking about getting it next but I’m wondering if it’s not just another introduction and thus redundant.
