[Raphmedia]

How is going to school, starting up a career and writing books is any different than going to school, starting up a career and writing code?

Do you think that the code we write add that much value to society? Unless you are a computer scientist and pushing the boundaries, our code will simply rot away in 4 years and nobody will remember one line of it.

[douche]

The equivalent in writing for what most programmers do would be marketing, PR, journalism, or technical writing. You can get a paying job to write, it's just going to be that kind of writing - not for your Next Great American Novel. Likewise, I get paid a salary to bolt together shitty enterprise software and automate call-center workers out of jobs - not to tickle my fancy writing video games or exploring the corners of computer science.

[Raphmedia]

Aren't we talking about technical writing? The problem in the OP's post are about writing a book on SVG.

I would be more likely to agree if this thread was about the issues encountered while writing a children's story book.

[douche]

Writing a technical book is, as far as I was aware, well known to be a losing bet, where it's exceedingly rare that authors make back their advances. e.g. http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/articles/technical-writin...

[zmaks]

Who needs a book about SVG? When I needed to build charts I took couple tutorials plus searched answers on stack overflow. It's way more efficient than reading huge book.

So, such books are needed by very small group of people. And this defines the pay.

[Raphmedia]

> Who needs a book about SVG? When I needed to build charts I took couple tutorials plus searched answers on stack overflow.

The people out there who pride themselves into being able to do their work without relying on googling everything? What if you have an idea or a requirement that has never been done before?