[sgt101]

I agree - "new material" is actually a concern in the context of a text book. I feel that synthesizing and presenting a coherent view of the communities best practice is a very valuable thing.

I think (but am very open to correction) that this is now a very hard thing for academics to do - the incentive for writing a text book is very low because they are not esteemed or counted as research? Writing a book like this is very hard.