If you missed the scuttlebutt on Twitter yesterday, I announced that John Myles White and my book, Machine Learning for Hackers was sent to the printers! This means that hard copies will be available very soon, and presumedly an eBook copy will be available even sooner.

We are thrilled by the community’s interest and enthusiasm for the book, and want to thank everyone who told us that they have already pre-ordered copies. Many people have been asking for a table of contents, which O’Reilly has not yet posted. To give people a preview I have posted the TOC below. Hopefully this will pique your interest even more!

TOC ML4Hackers

Comments

Stephen Colbert opened his October 25th, 2011, show with his normal exuberance. He bragged about his special early access to the iPhone, the iPad, and the iV (a product that feeds the Internet directly into your veins; he assured us a short wait of six months before its release). The release of Walter Isaacson's "Steve Jobs" would be no different, as Colbert pulled the 600-page biography from behind his desk. But Colbert immediately became perplexed.

The single finger touchscreen swipe on the cover didn't turn pages. When you turned the book upside down, the picture didn't reorient. Colbert complained there was no place to plug in his headphones so he could listen to it. And then he tried to activate the voice recognition by touching the bottom of the cover, "Tell me about Steve Jobs. Where is the nearest church or camera store?" He ended the segment saying that the device would soon be released with "a revolutionary softcover." The jokes played well to the geekish sensibilities of the studio audience, but I am not sure even the show's writers knew how well the sketch described the confused state of book publishing.


"Steve Jobs" will serve as a prominent road marker on the path from atoms to bits. The decision for Simon & Schuster to hold the digital release of the biography for two weeks to match the physical release even after the death of Jobs is worthy of a Harvard Business School case. And at the same time, even as computers now interface with us in almost every aspect of our lives and Jobs' critical role in that proliferation, the majority of people will read his life story on paper.


Colbert poking fun at the Jobs biography repeats, again, a meme that we in the publishing industry should be gravely concerned about — our customers don't know what a book is anymore.


The consequences of book updates

In July 2011, I launched an experimental project with O'Reilly called "Every Book Is a Startup." The project is meant to poke at the boundaries of traditional publishing. The book was created around the idea that new material will be released over time, culminating in a finished work early in 2012. Readers are encouraged to constantly give feedback about the material. The pricing is dynamic, increasing slowly to match the amount of material released, but once purchased, a customer receives all future updates for free.

We are only using one distribution point at the start of the project, oreilly.com, because the distribution system for electronic books is not designed to allow an ebook to be updated and released again. You might remember one of the side effects of Amazon's 2009 recall of "1984" was that after the book was restored, customers found their bookmarks and notes had disappeared.

We, unfortunately, found the same problem with our release strategy. Wonderful publishing startups like Readmill and SocialBook have created the possibility for readers using EPUB files to highlight important passages and share those with others back through the web, but when a reader of "Every Book Is A Startup" loads a new edition, their digital artifacts suffer the same fate as the readers of "1984" — the loss of their old thoughts as I present them with my new ones.

I have been hesitant to call "Every Book Is A Startup" a book because of the expectations people hold for a book: a finished work, written from a position of singular authority, available in some way in a physical form. What I never expected was how strongly the qualities of a book would be brought forward from the physical to the digital. Digital books have been designed to carry forward the same atomic quality of immutability of physical books. As I reached out to my colleagues working in the world of ebooks, the consensus was that no one had considered a reality where an author, given the ability to distribute directly and virtually cost free, would consider updating their work and the consequences that might have.


Bits and atoms don't behave the same way, but we have built the next step forward in publishing as though they do.

Possibilities arise from a new name

The trouble to this point is that a book is a book. Stacey Madden used precisely those words to title an essay in the inaugural issue of "Toronto Review of Books" that describes this predicament. "I do not mean to argue the advantages of paperbound books over their electronic counterparts," wrote Madden. "The contents of both are, for the most part, the same, and the differences lie mainly in medium. I am simply pointing out a semantic fact. E-books are not 'books' but digitized compositions." She firmly believes the book's 550-year-old meaning that connects both form and format should be maintained. "Before a collection of human thoughts is transformed into what we call a 'book,' it is merely a story, a manuscript, a document, or a text." Madden points to the need for more of us to see the difference between a book and its electronic counterparts.

Now, Madden writes further about the poetic qualities of the book and declares the superiority of the bound volume for its weight, smell, and ability to act as apartment furnishing. This judgment undermines the broader point and shows from another perspective the real trouble we are in.

The people who love books for what they are and what they have been are grabbing for their hardcovers and their paperbacks and saying "This word belongs to us." The digerati paving the way with wireless tablets and social networking recommendation services are trying to say, "You don't understand, we have books and we have made them way better." This is messy and leads to confusion.

We are living through a time in book publishing where words fail us, a situation that we should all find some irony in given the products we sell. We need some new language that describes what happens and, more importantly, what is possible when the words are separated from the paper. Those two things need to be separated so we can build systems and infrastructures that support the new capabilities of the technology.

For several decades, what we know today as a "car" was referred to as a "horseless carriage." It was easier to describe this new invention as what it was not, rather than what it was.

Maybe there are books and there are paperless books. I know it is a little awkward, and you want to ask yourself, "What does that mean?" — but when you remove the paper from a book, it becomes so much easier to see the possibilities.

TOC NY 2012 — O'Reilly's TOC Conference, being held Feb. 13-15, 2012, in New York City, is where the publishing and tech industries converge. Practitioners and executives from both camps will share what they've learned and join together to navigate publishing's ongoing transformation.

Register to attend TOC 2012

Photo credit for associated book picture used on home and category pages: Old book (1882) by VanDammeMaarten.be, on Flickr

Related:

Every Book is a Startup (book/project)
Every Book is a Startup (webcast)
What publishing can learn from tech startups
Ebooks and Print Books are Not Mutually Exclusive

When Mandy Brown, Jason Santa Maria and I formed A Book Apart, one topic burned uppermost in our minds, and there was only one author for the job.

Nothing else, not even “real fonts” or CSS3, has stirred the standards-based design community like the imminent arrival of HTML5. Born out of dissatisfaction with the pacing and politics of the W3C, and conceived for a web of applications (not just documents), this new edition of the web’s lingua franca has in equal measure excited, angered, and confused the web design community.

Win free copies of HTML5 For Web Designers on Gowalla!

Just as he did with the DOM and JavaScript, Jeremy Keith has a unique ability to illuminate HTML5 and cut straight to what matters to accessible, standards-based designer-developers. And he does it in this book, using only as many words and pictures as are needed.

Watch Jeremy Keith discuss HTML5 with Dan Benjamin and me live on The Big Web Show this Thursday at 1:00 PM Eastern.

There are other books about HTML5, and there will be many more. There will be 500 page technical books for application developers, whose needs drove much of HTML5’s development. There will be even longer secret books for browser makers, addressing technical challenges that you and I are blessed never to need to think about.

But this is a book for you—you who create web content, who mark up web pages for sense and semantics, and who design accessible interfaces and experiences. Call it your user guide to HTML5. Its goal—one it will share with every title in the forthcoming A Book Apart catalog—is to shed clear light on a tricky subject, and do it fast, so you can get back to work.

4 May 2010
Jeffrey Zeldman, Publisher
A Book Apart “for people who make websites”
In Association with A List Apart
An imprint of Happy Cog™

The present-day content producer refuses to die.

And don’t miss…

Read Chapter One free in today’s issue of A List Apart!
The author, Mr Jeremy Keith himself, shares his thoughts!
Creative director Jason Santa Maria discusses the design of A Book Apart!
Editor Mandy Brown discusses the business side of A Book Apart!

Doug Chadwick is a writer of natural history based in Whitefish, Montana. His work has taken him all over the world to research books and articles about whales, grizzlies, ants and elephants. Six years ago, wanting to spend more time in the field – and less at the keyboard – he began working closer to home with the Glacier Wolverine Project.


Though Doug never intended to write about the wolverine, as he learned more about its exploits and the threats this badass but vulnerable animal faces on a warming planet, he decided the best way to help it was to tell its story. His new book, The Wolverine Way, is both a tale of outdoor adventure and paean to one of “the toughest mammals in the world.” Published by Patagonia, it is now available in hardback on our website, in our stores and at other booksellers.


Doug recently returned home from five days in the mountains, dragging a sled full of tracking and camping gear in pursuit of wolves and wolverines. We found him there and asked a few questions about the subject of his new book.


There's a story in your new book, The Wolverine Way, about an Alaskan gold miner who traps a wolverine, bashes in its head, and then, thinking it’s dead, ties its front legs over his shoulders to pack him out, only to find out the wolverine still had fight left in him. What, if anything, does that tell us about wolverines and man’s relationship with them?


The tale is a reminder of how wolverines have been portrayed mainly as whirlwinds of destruction – something like big backwoods goblins on crack. That’s not to say wolverines don’t have a ferocious side. They are exceptionally strong and amazingly fearless. Can you think of any other 20- to 40-pound animal willing to try driving grizzlies off carcasses? I’d rank wolverines among the toughest mammals in the world. But as we finally begin to peel away the mysteries surrounding this species’ natural history, those frontier yarns featuring perpetually pissed-off, dangerous wolverines turn out to be ... well, not complete b.s., but only one part of a much larger and more fascinating picture.







You’re a writer of natural history with a background in field biology. But when you volunteered with the Glacier Wolverine Project in 2004, you had no intention of writing about wolverines – despite the promise of some great story material. What changed your mind?


During the time I volunteered with the project, I was also traveling to report on snow leopards in central Asia, right whales in the sub-Antarctic, weaver ants in Australia, elephants in Thailand, the ecology of Southeast Alaska’s great coastal rainforest, and rhinos and tigers in Assam, among other magazine assignments. I loved each job. Nevertheless, the last thing I wanted to do back home in Montana, was continue being a journalist every day. Glacier National Park is my backyard. It may sound strange, but dragging bait to lay scent trails to wolverine capture sites, following paw prints while skiing through blizzards and dodging avalanches, radio-tracking the animals over summer passes and peaks ... this was my vacation. Besides, the researchers really needed an extra hand. They didn’t have the money to hire enough people to keep up with their radioed subjects, not ones that cover vast, rugged territories as relentlessly as wolverines do. The challenge of trying to keep up long enough to discover more about these wildest of wild lives drew an extraordinary team of mountaineers and conservationists happy to help out for free. Being part of that crew was a reward in itself.


Wolverines, I began to realize, are every bit as cool as wolves and grizzlies – and equally important as symbols of the last untamed places. Debates over better-known wildlife and protection of the homelands they depend upon seemed to be in the news almost daily. Meanwhile, wolverines were becoming rarer south of Canada than either wolves or grizz, yet hardly anyone was paying attention. The need to get wolverines on the public’s radar was largely what prompted me to start writing this book. Folks will work hard to save a species they care about, but they first have to be able to envision its life and needs. Since I had the privilege of getting acquainted with a number of individual wolverines and their offspring over half a dozen years, I decided that it was time to start sharing everything the animals and the researchers had been teaching me.


Wolverines inhabit some of the world’s least hospitable terrain, and you guys spend days and nights out in sub-zero conditions trying to find them. It must be really taxing work. Can you describe one of your forays into the field and how you guys handle one of these tightly wound bundles of tooth and claw when you live-trap one?


I’m going to answer this question with an excerpt from the first chapter:


Fine snow streaked the air, riding sideways on a gale, in early March 2006. Biologist Rick Yates led the way, breaking trail on skis through the powder. Great cliffs striped with avalanche tracks rose on all sides. Somewhere higher up among the clouds stretched the icefields that gave this valley – Many Glacier – its name. We crossed two frozen lakes and finally passed into an old-growth spruce forest that took the edge off the storm. Beneath the branches, half-buried in snow, stood a large box made of logs six- to eight-inches thick. It looked a little like a scaled-down cabin. But it was a trap, and there was a wolverine inside.


The animal had entered during the night. We knew from its radio frequency that this was M1: M for male, Number 1 because he had been the first wolverine caught and radio-tagged during a groundbreaking study of the species under-way here in Glacier National Park, Montana. Sometimes the researchers called him Piegan instead after a 9,220-foot mountain at the head of the valley. To me, he was Big Daddy, constantly patrolling a huge territory that straddled the Continental Divide near the heart of the park. His domain overlapped those of several females, and he had bred with at least three of them over the years while successfully keeping rivals at bay.


We paused a short distance from the trap to listen. M1 was silent. Predictably, he began to give off warning growls as we drew nearer. They rumbled deep and long with a force that made you think a much larger predator lay waiting inside, something more on the order of a Siberian tiger – or possibly a velociraptor. I lifted the box’s heavy lid an inch or two to peer inside. The front wall underneath was freshly gouged and splintered, its logs growing thin under Big Daddy’s assault. Raising the lid another notch, I could finally make him out as a dense shadow toward the rear of the trap. Wolverines have dark brownish eyes, but in the light from my flashlight those orbs reflected an eerie blue-green color that glowed like plutonium, surrounded by the rising steam from his breath. The next things I saw were white claws and teeth and stringers of spit all flying at me with a roar before I dropped the lid shut and sprang back.


Inside the trap, the roaring and growling continued – wolverine for “Hope you won’t be needing your face for anything, Tame Boy, because I’m going to take it off next time!” – followed by the sound of more wood being ripped apart. Given a few more hours, M1 would have an escape hole torn through the mini-log cabin. From time to time, the tips of his claws poked out just above the uppermost log of the front wall while he rammed his head against the lid. He was trying to shove the thing upward, though the ice-encrusted logs that formed the top of the box must have weighed 100 pounds.


I looked round at the trees and the snow swirls beyond and shook my head, thinking of my long-ago vow to steer clear of these creatures. Having joined the Glacier Wolverine Project in 2004, I was going into my third straight year of breaking that vow in just about every way it could possibly be broken. No regrets. These animals’ off-the-charts strengths and survival skills had become a source of inspiration for me by now. Even so, I was never going to get used to dealing with the intensity of a wolverine when it’s up close and cornered. Nobody did.


You said in your book that a male wolverine will wander 200-square miles or more, and do some crazy things along the way – like climb straight up the vertical face of a 10,000-plus-foot peak for no apparent reason. Their wandering sometimes gets them into trouble with hunters and trappers, and with increasing development and now climate change, the size of their habitat is expected to shrink. Does any animal really need that much space to survive? What exactly are they up to in their wanderings?


Large as they are, the territories of Glacier’s wolverines are a fraction the size of those claimed by wolverines elsewhere. In the central Idaho wilderness, for instance, a female might claim an exclusive domain of 300-square miles and a male more than 400-square miles. With long legs, big snowshoe paws, long claws for crampons, powerful muscles, a frost-shedding fur coat, and a revved-up metabolism, wolverines are able to master terrain too high, cold, steep, and snowbound for other predators and scavengers to use as easily. This frees the species from a lot of competition for food. Why do individual wolverines require so much of that harsh landscape for a territory? Because there is so little food in any one place. The same factors that discourage competitors also make prey animals relatively scarce compared to the numbers thriving in warmer, lower habitats. The wolverine strategy seems to be: if you’ve got a world-class nose and keep constantly on the move over a big enough area, you’re going to turn up something to eat. The key is not to be too concerned about whether what you find is a little ground squirrel, an injured deer, or the frozen[…]

Book By Its Cover is a glorious new blog devoted to the beauty of books.