At 06:38 PM 6/05/2004 +0200, you wrote:

>hello Helen and all,
>
>I have seen that the shipping of your book is postponed to july. Any
>problems?

No problems, it seems it's just a question of production scheduling
capacity. Apress doesn't usually do such big books and, as it was
explained to me, the book has "an amazing number of elements". It has 40
chapters, which kind of puts it into the "magnum opus" category; circa 900
pages in the body of the book, not counting the Appendices and Index. It
has a LOT of illustrations, tables, code examples and Appendices, that all
need special treatment. They are still working on the "elements" - today I
received chapters 11 and 12 for final review!

The manuscript also has to go to the US Library of Congress in plain text
form to get its clearance for use as an educational textbook. The decision
to do this added three weeks but it makes it better for Firebird, since it
puts Firebird on the table for colleges to choose for use in their curricula.

Some days, it's like watching grass grow. I'm sure there are faster
publishers, but these people are very thorough AND (let's not forget it)
they were the only tech publishing house in America that was willing to
take the risk and do a book about Firebird.

Frankly, the book took twice as much time to write as I estimated
originally. Some parts got rewritten up to four times during the Fb 1.5
release cycle.

Helen