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While I agree with the general argument in the article that sales data and similar metrics should be public, I think there's a lot more that can be done to unlock all of the knowledge stored in books. There are vast amounts of knowledge that humanity has built up over centuries that are either hard to find or hard to access unless you know where to look. How does someone like me discover that knowledge for a topic I'm interested in?

I wrote a book that was recently published to help junior and mid-level programmers build up their soft-skills to advance their career[0]. The book was published by Holloway[1]. They have an interesting platform to solve this problem, which is why I chose to publish with them. They publish works primarily through their online reader, which is indexable by search engines. So someone searching for "How to get up to speed on a new codebase" in their preferred search engine could stumble across the chapter titled "How to read unfamiliar code"[2] and read a free preview of the book. Over time, people can discover and access the knowledge stored in any book that is published on Holloway's platform.

Another nice side effect of the platform is that it can be updated over time, so outdated knowledge or content can be revised, updated, and re-indexed by the search engines as knowledge about topics evolve.

If you're considering writing a book, or have a manuscript and are looking for a publisher, I'd recommend giving Holloway a look to see if it would be a good fit.

[0]: https://www.holloway.com/b/junior-to-senior

[1]: https://www.holloway.com/

[2]: https://www.holloway.com/g/junior-to-senior/sections/how-to-...




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