You mean, it is ok for a publisher to release poor quality books now and again as long as the average stays good enough?
Yes. I doubt there is another way.
Do you know how tech book publishing works? It's not fiction publishing -- publishers aren't deluged with a large pool of manuscripts from which they can pick out the best ones. The financial incentives are very poor: Unless they target a very broad audience (see: David Pogue) tech book authors don't make enough royalty money to reimburse them for their time. So publishers must approach potential authors in advance, woo them, and sign them to book-publishing contracts before the books are written. Since they can't offer enough money, the publishers must approach people who have other incentives -- e.g. existing experts or inventors who want to promote themselves or their tools. Unfortunately, the skills required to become an expert in something like XML are not necessarily correlated with the skills required to write a good book about it. And, of course, it can be hard to identify an expert in advance. And it's often better to hire a lesser writer, or a lesser expert, than to have no book on a particular topic in your product line.
Once a book is delivered (if the book is delivered -- a lot of authors burn out in the process), the publisher can work with the author to edit it, but the option of rejecting the manuscript is probably difficult and expensive and politically nasty. So, once written, I suspect that a tech book tends to be published. Might as well let the reviewers and the public do the dirty work of deciding that it's bad. Particularly since there are many subspecialties where a badly-written book is far better than no book at all.
Yes. I doubt there is another way.
Do you know how tech book publishing works? It's not fiction publishing -- publishers aren't deluged with a large pool of manuscripts from which they can pick out the best ones. The financial incentives are very poor: Unless they target a very broad audience (see: David Pogue) tech book authors don't make enough royalty money to reimburse them for their time. So publishers must approach potential authors in advance, woo them, and sign them to book-publishing contracts before the books are written. Since they can't offer enough money, the publishers must approach people who have other incentives -- e.g. existing experts or inventors who want to promote themselves or their tools. Unfortunately, the skills required to become an expert in something like XML are not necessarily correlated with the skills required to write a good book about it. And, of course, it can be hard to identify an expert in advance. And it's often better to hire a lesser writer, or a lesser expert, than to have no book on a particular topic in your product line.
Once a book is delivered (if the book is delivered -- a lot of authors burn out in the process), the publisher can work with the author to edit it, but the option of rejecting the manuscript is probably difficult and expensive and politically nasty. So, once written, I suspect that a tech book tends to be published. Might as well let the reviewers and the public do the dirty work of deciding that it's bad. Particularly since there are many subspecialties where a badly-written book is far better than no book at all.