Blog Book Publishing

I have to admit—I know jack about the book publishing process. But… I know perfectly what book reading is about because I’m a reading junkie myself. I’ve noticed an interesting shift in how some web design books are written these days.

For example, Molly’s 250 HTML and Web Design Secrets—an awesome book full of helpful tips and tricks. It may as well serve as a desktop reference. The book is like a big published blog: there’s a printed link to a post in somebody else’s blog on almost every page.

Another example: The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Beauty for the Web, which I’m reading right now too. The book is beautifully composed and has printed links to other people’s blogs/personal sites all over the place.

Dan follows down this path to a certain extent too with his book Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook.

Personally, I welcome this kind of writing. Not that nobody ever listed a URL to an online resource from their book, but nobody has done it to the extent of Molly’s 250 Secrets.

One downside of this is the so called link rot: the author gets screwed if a link mentioned in the book goes away. But then again, life span of web-related books is so short these days that it shouldn’t be a biggie.

I think blogging will change the way books are written and published, and I’m curious to see how Blog Book Publishing evolves in the near future.