Books as Software
For decades, we treated books as software. We boxed it, wrapped it, bundled it up and shipped it to stores, where it was displayed on windows. While lot of commercial software products still share few of these elements, the high-street software store has all but disappeared. It is place has been taken by an increasingly agile deployment method, first from obscure FTP servers but now revolutionized in scale and convenience by the Web. So why shouldn't books move in the same direction?This question deserves some introspection, not merely a affirmative shout from the radical gallery. The question actually represents few concerns rolled into one, and it would help to unbundle them.
The most obvious problem is one of medium quality. Have you tried reading a Project Guttenberg book on-line? I have, and I have often failed. I could, at best, get through small excerpts of Shakespearean plays before the medium becomes an obstacle. But electronic content has it is own obvious benefit, namely searchability. And disseminating camera-ready copy, as I effectively do, seems to strike a happy medium between these 2 extremes.
Next, do we even need to distribute upgrades? A literary reader might find this not only useless but, worse, horrifying. But an academic textbook isn't, primarily, a literary work. A good book should demonstrate an endless series of innovations and improvements, just like a software package. I find, from experience, that most of these changes are far closer in spirit to the software notion of ``versions'' than the publishing notion of ``editions''. This, in fact, is a realm in which software has taken a lead, making a distinction that traditional publishing could not: major-version numbers in software correspond to editions, while minor-version numbers represent smaller, more localized upgrades.
We could push the metaphor further and argue that a book isn't a lot a software package as a collection of software components. Many textbooks make this explicit by providing a flow-diagram of dependencies between chapters, which are a representation of expected and provided interfaces. Textbooks even indicate different routes through the material. But the physical book could never correspond to these virtual routes: you have to take all or nothing. If a professor wants to assemble a course from parts of five books, why should students suffer through that much bulk? Software linkers solve precisely this problem.
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