O'Reilly Network: Unix Text Processing

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http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/1998/text_processing.html
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Date: Nov 12 1998
From: Chuck Robey
To: ask_tim@oreilly.com
Subject: Unix Text Processing

Tim,

I'm just wondering, since this book is one you wrote, apparently has no competition at all, is pretty good, and you're the publisher, this book has been allowed to go out of print? Groff has breathed much new life into the subject, but you wouldn't need to edit one word to get sales on it. You haven't any serious competition ... no, strike that, you haven't *any* competition.

On top of that, heck, it was a great book!

-- Chuck

Chuck,

Actually, we weren't the publisher. We did this book early in our careers, and signed it with Hayden (which was later acquired by Sams) as an experiment, to compare our own home-grown publishing with that done by other publishers. The fact that they did such a poor job of standing behind the book was part of what convinced us to go our own way!

The book did finally go completely out of print a few years ago, and rights reverted to us. However, by that time, the source files were archived only on floppies for a machine (the Convergent Miniframe!) that we no longer have. So it would be more work to dig this book out of its grave than you might think.

Furthermore, while groff has certainly got some life to it, even in troff's heyday, the book didn't do all that well. Some of it had to do with bad marketing by Sams, but we used to sell the book ourselves in our catalog (even though we weren't the publisher.) It was always a wonder to us that the book, which included the entire text of Learning the vi Editor, plus hundreds of pages of other great material for only a few dollars more, never sold as well as the vi book. That was part of what led to my conclusion that people respond to "information pain." People were saying "I'm having trouble with vi" but no one said "I have trouble with UNIX text processing." That was part of what led us to focus on books on specific programs rather than more general titles.

So if we ever did put this out again, we'd probably want to reprint it as a groff book, and cut out the stuff on vi, shell programming, etc.

Finally, though, even if we could dig it out, there is some pride of authorship that would make us want to bring the book up to date. If we could find the files, I'd gladly copyleft the material, so groff users could benefit from it.

--Tim

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