Taken for Granted

Yesterday an old friend and colleague Paul McLellan dropped by with a couple of copies of his new book EDAgraffiti, which he wrote based on his well-known blog hosted by EDN magazine, amplifying and expanding on many of the themes he has written about. I hope to read it and consider doing a review of it in IEEE Design and Test - it would certainly be a different kind of book to review than the normal technical round. You can read more about it in Paul’s blog and also buy it at CreateSpace here.

Paul McLellan

Equally interesting to the book itself is the way it was written and published. Paul decided to self-publish using the CreateSpace service, which allows an extremely attractive price ($25 US plus shipping) and a much higher royalty to the author. Having co-written or co-edited ten books myself, plus contributed chapters to many others, the self-publishing trend is one that has interested me for a while. At one point several colleagues and I were thinking of doing a self-published book but the project was suspended for lack of time. Initially I was the most skeptical but it still sounds like something worth trying to do. Paul said the process was relatively painless. It will be interesting to see how well his book does vs. the more traditional publishing and sales route, especially when he decides to make it available electronically.

The world is changing, often faster than we would like, but it keeps life interesting!