Ping Win Hill; X Chapters

I'd guess on the order of one year.

By the way: when will third edition of your book come, Phil?

I've been stuck at about 40 FIXMEs for a year, because work has been super busy and I keep adding stuff. Goal is 12/31/18 to submit the MS, and then five or six months for production.

Thanks

Phil Hobbs

What about that opto-electronics apps book you were thinking of talking to your publisher about a year or two ago, did anything come of that?

They liked the idea, and on the strength of our relationship, they offered me a contract to do it. Unfortunately their standard contract includes an indemnity, and I'm not an insurance company. The BEOS contract has that too, but when I originally wrote it I didn't possess anybody's confidential information except IBM's, and they were encouraging me to write the book. Thus the prospect of anybody making a legal claim against it is fairly remote.

(An amusing side note--the best annual performance rating I got in my 21 years with IBM was for 1998, the year that I blew off the things I signed up to do and wrote a lore book instead. IBM Research was a great place to work back then.)

Regarding "Designing Electro-Optical Systems", a lot of the stuff I want to talk about relates to client work, which is another matter entirely. I've had people tell me 'trade secrets' that I'd known for 20 years, so there are lots more opportunities for misunderstandings. There's no way I'm signing up to an indemnity on that one.

I spent an hour on the phone with the publisher's lawyers before they admitted that they didn't have the authority to get rid of the indemnity, so I walked. A pity--Wiley is a great company to work with otherwise, and they've been my publisher for almost 20 years.

So once I have a MS in some sort of reasonable shape I'll send it to Cambridge or McGraw-Hill or Prentice-Hall or somebody like that.

I originally picked Wiley by looking at my bookshelf and seeing which publisher produced the largest percentage of my favourite technical books. Wiley won by a mile, followed by Academic Press. I sent them my MS and they took it.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

That's an interesting insight into the academic publishing business. I'm surprised a publishing company like Wiley don't cover their authors for any and all legal proceedings (arising from their published work).