What’s a Beta Book?

Writing books takes a long time. Our readers often ask us whether it’s possible to get access to the material in a new book before it has been published—a sort of “beta test” form of the book, if you will. While we’ve had many requests for early access to our books, we’ve always said no (until now).

Why did you say no?

Before a book gets to the final, ready-to-publish state, it normally looks quite rough. It will have hundreds of typos and grammatical errors. It’s likely to have technical errors that would normally get corrected in a final read-through by reviewers. And it’ll certainly look fairly ugly—we don’t do any layout work until just prior to sending a book to the printer, so there will be widows, orphans, text split across page turns and so on.

We were worried that folks would take the book in this state and critique it as if it were a finished book, and that would be unfair to the author.

So why are you doing it now?

We decided to trust our readers :) Ultimately, we think the idea of giving you early access to this great material is important. It helps you out, and it’ll help us as we get feedback.

How does it work?

A couple of months before a book is due to appear in its final form, we might release it under the Beta Book program. We’ll make two products available in our store:

  • the Beta Book in PDF form
  • the Beta Book/Paper book combo pack (PDF now, paperback when available)

Both items will be for sale at the regular price for these products (which means the combo pack will available for a substantial discount over buying the PDF and book separately).

The Beta Book only exists in PDF form. When you place your order for either of these products, we’ll ship you the Beta Book in its current state as a PDF.

Do I Get The Final Book, Too?

Of course! When the final book is released, we’ll automatically ship you the final version of the PDF. If you ordered the combo pack, we’ll also ship you the physical book at this time. You’ll also continue to get fixes to the final edition PDF for free (for the lifetime of that edition).

Can I preorder just the paper book under this program?

No. The rules of our credit card processor stop us taking preorders more than 30 days before we ship something.

Can I get updates to my Beta PDF before the final book appears?

Yes. Log in to your account page and you’ll see the status of all the PDFs you own, including Beta Books. If there’s a more up-to-date version of a PDF that you own, you can click to update it.

I found a mistake in a Beta Book. What should I do?

Log in to your home page. Next to each PDF you own you’ll see a link to the corresponding errata page. Click on this link to see existing errata and add your own. Also, if you look at the bottom of each page in the PDF, you’ll see a hyperlink labeled “Report Erratum.” This takes you directly to the book’s errata page.

What kinds of mistakes are you interested in?

At this stage we’re really interested in hearing about content: typos, grammatical mistakes, technical errors, and missing or hard-to-understand text. We do not want to hear about layout issues (overlong lines, widows and orphans, bad page breaks, figure placement, and so on). These sorts of layout issues are fixed later during typesetting.

Thanks, and we hope you enjoy our Beta Book Program!

<< How do I change my e-mail or mailing address? | Fridays >>