We’re more than halfway through Febliary and this week we released version 3.3 of my book Take Control of the Mac Command Line with Terminal. I have an update from another author that needs to be edited, and a bunch of other Take Control stuff to work on, but nothing major to report or announce at the moment.
We’ve had inquiries about two topics that seem to be on everyone’s mind, so let me say a few words about them as they relate to Take Control Books:
AI, large language models (LLMs), ChatGPT, and the like: We will not be publishing books on any of these topics in the foreseeable future. The technology is in a tremendous state of flux and changing very rapidly, so anything we might write would be out of date before it’s even finished, and keeping something like that up to date would be a quixotic task. (There are also a number of legal issues that could change the game at any moment.) Even if none of that were a consideration, however, we would need to have an author who’s both well-acquainted with the technology and interested in writing a book on it, but we don’t.
Apple Vision Pro and visionOS: Again, there won’t be a Take Control book about this any time soon, although I’m sure the technology will be mentioned here and there in other books as time goes on. There’s just no way we’d sell enough copies of a book on this tech to both turn a profit and pay for the hardware we’d need for testing. As the technology matures and the product line (we imagine) goes down in price and achieves more mainstream adoption, we’ll certainly revisit this decision.
Although many factors go into our decisions about what titles to publish, the most important one is: will we be able to sell enough copies of this hypothetical book to make it worth the author’s considerable investment of time and effort? If we aren’t convinced that the answer is yes, we have to say no to the book. I know there are plenty of topics I personally would love to have books about, but sometimes the math just doesn’t work.
That said, we do have two authors working on brand-new titles right now that are both a bit different, and I think they’ll appeal to a tremendous number of people. They’re not far enough along yet for me to say more, but over the next month or two, I’ll have more to say.