Hello all,
I just emailed Winfield Hill about the status of the third edition of Art of Electronics and they've finished writing it. They now in typesetting and it should be published by late spring/early summer next year (May 2014).
And it sounds like there will be a second volume to contain all the new material that wouldn't fit in the main work at a future date.
Hello Mr. Hill,
I hope everything is going well for you this year. I wanted to write once again to ask about the progress of the third edition of Art of Electronics. When we spoke last year you said you were planning on cutting off writing new material at some point last year if the writing didn't finish soon. Have you finished writing and moved on to editing yet?
Several people have contacted the publisher and have gotten responses to expect the book sometime around May 2014 (so a manuscript has been submitted and everyone is well into editing), but to me that feels like researcher's saying a new technology, like graphene transistors or brain to pc interfaces, should hit the market in the next 5-10 years. A great image, but not likely.
Where do you see the book in the pipeline? I'd like to share your opinion with the community again.
The complete 15-chapter book has gone through copy-
editing and we're doing our review pass now. Then on
to typesetting (editing of our TEX text, figure placement,
etc) and then galleys, etc. So next spring looks good.
They will be an additional five chapter eXtension
H&H AoE "x-chapter" book following in about a year
with new advance materials.
Sounds promising, but I'm not holding my breath. The third edition has been just around the corner since forever. Will see when they are actually shipping books. The x-chapter book sounds interesting, though.
True, but the uncertain part has always been the writing and that is now complete (for the main book), so the schedule could still slip by months, but it's no longer an issue of slipping by years any longer.
Great news. Typesetting and proof-reading that thing will still take a while.
Typesetting? Typesetting? They still do that in book publishing?
I would have assumed that part of the printing process is fairly quick and automated now.
Mucking about with your latex to get it juuuust right can take some time every now and then.
Ha, I meant laying out the pages. Starting to show my age. Every little change that affects page length can have a flow-on effect which can be quite exponential.
Ha, I meant laying out the pages. Starting to show my age. Every little change that affects page length can have a flow-on effect which can be quite exponential.
Are you saying that by adding a picture to the text, the reassignment of page numbers, references etc. takes more than 10 seconds on a computer?
Ha, I meant laying out the pages. Starting to show my age. Every little change that affects page length can have a flow-on effect which can be quite exponential.
Are you saying that by adding a picture to the text, the reassignment of page numbers, references etc. takes more than 10 seconds on a computer?
No, but sometimes the physical number of pages is decided upon before final proofing which can cause problems.
Ha, I meant laying out the pages. Starting to show my age. Every little change that affects page length can have a flow-on effect which can be quite exponential.
Are you saying that by adding a picture to the text, the reassignment of page numbers, references etc. takes more than 10 seconds on a computer?
As a graphic designer - the answer is yes, it does take more than 10 secs ;-)
Ha, I meant laying out the pages. Starting to show my age. Every little change that affects page length can have a flow-on effect which can be quite exponential.
Are you saying that by adding a picture to the text, the reassignment of page numbers, references etc. takes more than 10 seconds on a computer?
Yes, deciding on size, layout and exact position takes time for each graphic, that doesn't include creating the graphic itself, which is often just a placeholder while writing. It could take hours for a single graph in the worst case.
My wife edits etc books, had a bit of a chuckle when I said that the text just flows automatically.
The problem is that people use Word. For a few dozen pages it works, you get 800 pages of text, pictures and maths then it screws up big time on a regular basis, every few hours. And recovering is not an easy or quick job. Seems Word also doesn't understand multiple files per book, it all has to be in one huge, 50MB, file. Crap. Why not use another wordprocessor? Well, ask the author, you get what you are given and Word unfortunately is it.
Then you get authors who lay an equation out using spaces and underscores and smaller font sizes for powers.
Doesn't seem to have progressed beyond what Ventura managed a couple of decades ago.
Quite a few books have been hammered out by lone authors in a relatively short amount of time with DocBook ... I have a few books done that way, perfectly functional ... but not pretty
Do publishers really use Word for layout? Back when I was doing that stuff I would take the Word file, strip out all the formatting, import the text in DTP software, add formatting and place images. And yes, that would take more than 10 seconds
.
I wrote an 800 page book on embedded system programming about 6 years ago and did it all in Word. The publisher took the Word files and put them into Adobe InDesign for printing. (In fact, the InDesign layout and editing was sub-contracted to a one person shop and it took her about a month to do the layout and produce a PDF proof and then incorporate my edits.) The book had at least 200 drawings and photos, probably closer to 400, plus program snippets in different font and layout, etc.
All that assuming that the person is very familiar with the tool.
Most word users know about 2% of what the program can do and that is enough. The same goes for all the other programs. If the user masters the software things can be accomplished rather quickly and yet putting together a manual or a book or even a flyer can be a tedious task where content is no problem but the cosmetics take most of the time.
Do publishers really use Word for layout?
No, of course not. Read the post again, he was saying that authors submit manuscripts in Word. The big problem with that is how to handle authors' revisions... usually it's easiest to have them mark up paper proofs.
There's also a rule of publishing that states that the more work the author does to submit a production ready manuscript, the more likely it is that the publisher will decide to rekey it.
Manuscripts should not contain in line equations, images, etc. These will have to be handled separately by the layout person anyhow, and using Word as a plain text editor with bold/italic hugely reduces its ability to mess things up.
For revisions PDF is a decent tool in my opinion.
I just emailed Winfield Hill about the status of the third edition of Art of Electronics and they've finished writing it. They now in typesetting and it should be published by late spring/early summer next year (May 2014).
And it sounds like there will be a second volume to contain all the new material that wouldn't fit in the main work at a future date.
Wonder if this still holds true?
Hello all,
I just emailed Winfield Hill about the status of the third edition of Art of Electronics and they've finished writing it. They now in typesetting and it should be published by late spring/early summer next year (May 2014).
I was just wondering if there are any updates.
I think i found some info saying that the older book still would be good since some of the material are replaced, so in meantime I bought the 2nd edition.. it was huge..
I've emailed Winfield again and will update the forum when I hear back.
I got a response from Winfield today.
For the last several months we have been going over
the 1400 figures, which were drafted in India. We're
editing them in Adobe Illustrator, and are 75% done.
Then, after a last pass on text edits, we'll be making
the index. This involves thinking of all the alternate
words blokes use to describe the same thing. About
that time CUP will start doing the page layout. Then
we'll have a galley proof to study and approve.
Looking on wikipedia Galley Proofs are limited runs used for proof reading and sometimes advance copies, so that should be the final step before mass publication.
That said it sounds like there's a minimum of months of work remaining, but it does sound like less than six months of work to my, untrained, ears, so I'd expect to hear a real release date in about five or six months or shortly after (since people are horrible at estimates and always underestimate everything).
I'd give a couple more months for reviewing the remaining figures, a few weeks for a last editing pass, and couple of months for the index, then a few weeks, maybe a month or two for proofreading. Then production would start and that would take a minimum of a few weeks to a couple months to build stock.
One article I found on Chronicle of Higher Education described hand building his index (completely after the fact) in a month. I'd expect some of this work to be done already and this to be a much large work, I'd expect two months there.
I've done indices before, albeit on much smaller documents. Definitely the kind of thing that you should be thinking about as you're writing, rewriting and checking your paragraphs. And that's in a medium which supports references and hyperlinking (LaTeX).
Tim