Re:Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
by cultofmetatron on Sunday September 11, 2022 @05:57AM
(#32798325)
interesting. does your book cover geohashing. I've been curious how points and polygons get converted to geohashes and how the search using these work. I currently postgis as a black box but I haven't been able to find any books or articles that really explain in depth how they work.
Re:Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
by zlurker on Sunday September 11, 2022 @11:50AM
(#32800651)
There's a great blog written by someone who wrote a very efficient geohashing algorithm in go/assembly that may help a little bit with understanding it.
https://mmcloughlin.com/posts/geohash-assembly
The simplified TLDR is:
1. Convert lat and long to something that's represented by bits. 2. Interleave these bits such that lat and long bits alternate in the sequence. 3. Optionally, but seems to be the standard, encode the bits into the custom base32 character set.
Re:Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
by cultofmetatron on Monday September 12, 2022 @06:03AM
(#32807941)
thanks for the link. I would pay good money for a book that explains in plain english and a few go/python examples how these are implemented and the theory behind them.
Re:Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
by yencabulator on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @06:46PM
(#32831153)
S2 has a good amount of documentation about it.
https://blog.christianperone.com/2015/08/googles-s2-geometry...
The next one sold none. Which is expected since I made it openly available from my site. It hit about half a million downloads in the first year. Alas, most of them were from one IP somewhere in Czechia so I guess someone's spider got stuck in the web. But real people downloaded it too, about 12 000 copies. I even got a positive review from John D. Cook of which I'm extremely proud https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2020/04/24/programming-langua...
I'm now working on Geometry for Programming book for Manning https://www.manning.com/books/geometry-for-programmers. This would be my first collaboration with a publisher and so far it looks like it will become a moderate success. The early access sales are good, the reviews are encouraging. Even though, I would expect first year sales to be in thousands, maybe even low tens if we're lucky but no more. Definitely not enough to live of.
So while the post doesn't reveal any specific statistics, it does agree with my experience. Most books might indeed sell in very low numbers but they are not really published and maybe not even really books. If you're working with a well established publisher, you will get some moderate sales numbers guaranteed, and a even small chance to go big.