Real Soon Now - An update on my book

I've just a word from Packt, publishers of my book. Here's the low-down:

I completed review of the "pre-final" drafts last night. These drafts have been typeset, proofread and indexed and are basically as close to the print version as they get before we start killing trees. There were a few things to fix, mostly around line breaks that had crept into the code, but it looks good.

It's quite cool to see how much it changes with layout - it certainly looks more professional than in the MS Word template. Times New Roman no more!

The foreword by Alexander Limi, co-founder of Plone, has been included now as well. I'd like to thank Alex for putting up with my rather insistent pestering to make him complete this on time.

With that, we're pretty close. Packt sent me the front cover art for review, and I've approved it. It's quite funky, a bit more edgy than the usual Packt flowers (I think it's a plant stem, but it may also be a radioactive telephone wire). You'll see what I mean soon enough.

Contrary to what I was told before, there will not be an e-book version. Packt have taken a decision to stop making e-books available, mainly due to piracy. That's unfortunate, since I know many people want a searchable PDF, but I'm not sure how much influence I have over this. (I actually remember one moron in the #plone channel who'd gotten J. Cameron Cooper's Plone book as a PDF from eMule and was asking for the password ... it made my blood boil at the time (I wasn't kind in my response), and I guess my fears have been realised: commercialising e-books is still too hard).

On a more positive note, there have been 338 pre-orders to date! I certainly don't know 338 people, so unless my mother went a little crazy, I think that speaks volumes about the market for the book in particular, and for Plone in general. I'd like to extend a huge thank you to everyone who's pre-ordered!

And finally, if all goes well, Packt should start shipping the book at the end of September, which really is not far away.

I'll post here again when I know the exact date or if any more information comes to light, but it seems we're on the home-straight. I'm pretty excited! :-)