The Pragmatic Programmers just released a “beta” of the first book on Rails, Agile Web Development with Rails. Publishing a book can take several months between the 90% done version (what’s the analogy, the last 10% is 50% of the project?) and tree format(which is years in Rails time), so David & David put out an early release. The beta concept allows publishers to a. get feedback, allowing users to submit content, grammatical, spelling, and code related bugs by those most interested in the content b. gauge demand for their product c. receive early revenues, for the book in PDF format (you can choose to either buy the PDF, or the PDF+Book (when it comes out). Most importantly, eager fans get a sneak preview of a work in progress, and that generates both buzz and goodwill. As for the piracy issue of PDFs, there’s this nice bit of personalization at the bottom of every page, saying “This BETA-BOOK is prepared exclusively for Jason Wong.”
For the publishing industry, this is incredibly advanced.