It’s been a busy couple of months here as we prepare to launch our
new book-printing imprint, The Pragmatic Bookshelf. We spent the
year writing the first two books, Pragmatic Version Control and
Pragmatic Unit Testing. The interesting part was what happened
next.
We’d decided a while back that we were going to publish these books
ourselves. It wasn’t that we didn’t value our relationship with
Addison Wesley. We just wanted that bit of extra control that comes from
managing the entire process. So we found a printer, registered for ISBNs
and an imprint, typeset the books, got the covers designed, worked with
reviewers and a copy editor, and then finally sent the whole mess off to be
printed and bound. We thought the rest would be easy.
Instead, we then spent weeks putting all the fulfillment options in place.
It turns out that while shopping cart software is easy to find, decent,
distributed fulfillment software that did what we needed was not. I was
determined not to fall into the trap of writing our own, but (yet again) I
lost that battle. Still, the result is fairly nice: PDF orders are taken,
shipped, and billed totally automatically, and even physical orders are
pretty straightforward: a Ruby script downloads the details and coordinates
the printing of a label containing appropriate postage.
We put the site
live yesterday (do drop by—we’re proud of these books), and so
far things are running fairly smoothly.
Apart from the paper cuts…
