I digress... main purpose of this post is to congratulate Wes on his project with Jeff Douglas - the Salesforce Handbook (official announcement here at their blog). Certainly looking forward to seeing how this comes along. I'm particularly lucky that Wes is a part of my dev team at Telegraph in the UK, where we manage to keep pretty busy with a lot of interesting stuff on the force.com platform. I've been involved with salesforce.com for almost 4 years, and have seen the functionality of the apps and the platform grow to a pretty amazing level, and I can't quite imagine where to start thinking about how to encapsulate the best parts of this into a book! So good on you Wes and Jeff for tackling such a weighty task.
I'm also equally impressed to see that they're going to use Lulu to self-publish the book. Both in paper and digital forms I might add. Think back even 4-5 years, did anyone even talk then of using an online service to help them publish their own book?? Just 1 copy of a book, printed on-demand? I think the answer is probably, no. We can now 'on demand' for ourselves not just software and services on the internet, but hard material goods. T-shirts, books, heck there's even a machine that can reproduce itself!
None of this may be amazing to you, but as someone who has been at the forefront of software on-demand, the notion that this can be applied to material goods still strikes me as pretty 'out there'. It just shows how our world is evolving, and that we probably can't imagine what comes next in the on-demand arena. I went to an author talk recently by Nick Horgan who recently released his book Three Small Suspects about growing up in NZ. The talk was great, hearing some of the excerpts from the book which reminded me of some of the escapades I got up to growing up there also (although not nearly as bad as him!). But he went on to talk about how, even though his publishing company was a relatively localised one in Australasia, that his book had magically appeared on amazon.com. He asked his brother in Canada to order one, and it duly arrived 3 days later, but neither Nick nor his publishing company had ever sent stock to amazon, nor had they even asked for actual paper copies of the book. No, when the order came through to amazon.com in the US, they printed the book, the cover, and bound the copy, and shipped it, all within 3 days. Nick got a hold of the book from his brother, and said it was virtually identical to his own one. If we only knew how much 'on-demanding' went on in this world already, I think we'd be amazed!
Back to the original point of the post - looking out for progress on the Salesforce Handbook guys!
Thanks buddy. Funny thing is I checked your blog just yesterday and there was just your initial post. Glad to see you're getting back into the blogosphere.
ReplyDelete