Never Say Never
During its heyday, the Sun BluePrints Program published a number of books. Producing books was an expensive proposition, requiring a lot of time, resources and budget. People love books--not always for the right reasons. Executive management likes them because they look impressive, even if they only end up as (expensive) doorstops. Engineers love being a named author of a book: what more visible credibility could one ask for? Do they pay for themselves? Books on really hot topics do--they can even make the author (and publisher) wealthy, but there aren't lots of them. Many of the Sun BluePrints books were successful only because we subsidized them.
In the "golden days" of our industry preceding the "Dot Com Crash" many technical companies made it effortless for employees to order technical books; I remember at Sun I could order books off of FatBrain, the books arrived quickly and someone was billed, no questions asked. Following the crash, many companies halted similar practices and sales of technical books plummeted. I know the final two Sun BluePrints books sold only on the order of 500 copies. With the loss of staff resources, we stopped producing books. I don't see us as starting up again, but in this business one should never say never.
We do own the rights to most of the PDFs of these books and we use to make them available on the free CDs we used to distribute. Some of these books are quite old and out of date, and it is always amazing to find residual interest. We are afraid to throw anything away, just in case. So, it is with great pleasure that I announce that we will start posting these books on the new Sun BluePrints Wiki site. The first posted is for Rob Snevely's book, Enterprise Data Center Design and Methodology. Not only did this book sell pretty well, we bought and gave a lot of copies away because they were good for business. Enterprise data centers are filled with computers--the kinds of things that pay Sun's light bills.
Books are being offered strictly as-is. These are pre-production PDFs, so they aren't always the exact same layout, but all of the information is there. By placing them on the Wiki it is my hope that we might get some traffic: comments about the book, even possibly "votes" for update and revival. While I said we are out of the book publishing business, I also observed that we should never say never.
