Building Media Sites

I finished my third book for the year today. My sixth (or seventh) book overall depending on how you count. The book is called 'Building Media Sites' and it's a continuation of an article that I wrote for the O'Reilly Network that has been getting a lot of attention since it was first published.

This is a short book (~75 pages). It's the first book that I've written without having a publisher lined up. And really, any ideas there are welcome. I'll pitch it to the usual suspects, but if you have some alternative ideas I am all ears.

For it's size it's a pretty impressive piece of work. There is a lot of material in there on how to set up the site and debug it. There are several examples of video viewing applications written in Flex. There are AIR examples, including an uploader and a downloader. There is all of the code and step-by-step material on building cross-domain video widgets. There is even a chapter on building a mapping visualization with popup videos based on the Google Maps API for Flash.

I think short books are the way to go. Downloadable as PDF, with associated source code downloads. Honing in on a single subject with extensive detail around the application, how to extend it, debug it, put it into production and so on. With the package available for less than $20. Then with free updates provided by subscription.

Seems to me that this is the type of on-demand model people are looking for. I don't want to have to get in the car and burn the gas to get to Borders. Or what for a shipment from Amazon. I want the book, and particularly the code, right now. So that I can get started when I have the free-time. Which is usually right now and not several days from now.