Just shipped tons of books (literally)

In the last week we shipped out two much anticipated books: Advanced Rails Recipes and Deploying Rails Applications: A Step-by-Step Guide. We've finally reached the kind of shipping volumes where we get special treatment at the Post Office—I'm now allowed to make deliveries around the back, driving my truck up to the loading dock between all the 50' monsters. It's an interesting insight into their business. The vast majority of stuff sitting out there during the day is the free advertising fliers that get added to your mail—pallet upon pallet of them. If we want to save the forests, finding some way of banning those things would be a start. (But, of course, they probably subsidize the mail, so doing so would double the cost of postage. In this case, that's a price I might be willing to pay.)

Also (getting back on topic), Mike Clark has made a 12 minute video highlighting some of the more visual recipes in his book. Check out the link on the book's home page.

Comments

[Bil Kleb]

At least the catalogs can be quieted: http://catalogchoice.org

[Sergio Pereira]

Still on the topic of keeping trees alive, it would be really good if your books were available in O'Reilly's Safari or some equivalent (not just the PDFs.) I'd be happy to pay a few extra dollars a month on my subscription to have the pragprogs available.

[Dave Thomas]

Sergio:

Unfortunately, our experience is that Safari is a bad deal for authors, and we value the work that our authors do.

We're thinking about creating a subscription service for our PDFs, but that won't happen in the near term.

Dave