Living Websites, Living Books

Published on Aug 17, 2017 (updated Nov 19, 2024), filed under development, misc (feed). (Share this on Mastodon or Bluesky?)

To me, websites are living objects. They require regular care and maintenance. Such care starts with monitoring, from uptime control to visual site tests, demands technical quality control, and ends with content checks, all of them possibly requiring action at any time. Web maintenance is as complex as it is important, but only a living website, a maintained website with maintained content exemplifies quality and craftsmanship. (I write much about all these topics, and I try to lead by example.)

I do like, too, then, that years ago, at WHATWG level, Ian had driven the effort to move HTML from a versioned spec model to a “living standard” model. He didn’t do so for those same reasons that I just mentioned for websites, but there is overlap, and the decision is useful to scrap the problems versioning brings altogether and with that make the standardization process a true process, just like web design is a process, a process of iteration rather than “fire and forget.”

Overall I appreciate the sense that almost anything in life seems to be subject to change, to updates if we want. Keeping our work alive, tweaking and improving it when needed and feasible feels natural to me.

One area, however, where I didn’t at first feel this as a reader, but as an author, was with books. Much as with my articles I thought, oh, there’s something to add, there’s something to clarify, there’s a typo. In my first book nothing was to be done about it except to write a second edition. But when writing ebooks I noticed how I could walk back in, make changes, and re-publish the scripts—and doing so proved all easy with Amazon’s KDP (where forcing updates to existing readers is difficult though, so not to endanger readers’ highlights, and I’ll yet have to try other platforms to gauge how this would work there—I’m preparing a test with Lulu).

I’ve been releasing minor updates to my ebooks for a while now and you can tell by checking respective previews on Amazon and looking at the meta text at the beginning: It would say something like “Written and published 2015. Updated July 25, 2017.”, as with On Web Development.

This, now, is what I understand to be living books, and it’s what I find to be natural, for useful, to do for myself and to encourage others to likewise consider. I care less about effects on pricing at this point (irrespective of technical challenges with push updates I’m not sure living books warrant higher prices) than about the idea of, again, quality, of trying to provide the best possible product and service.

As such I’ve also approached O’Reilly to do similar with my Little Books:

[…] in my other ebooks I’ve somewhat established something I’d call “living books.” That is, I [review] them again every once in a while and publish updates and improvements on the spot.

For the Little Books I could imagine something like this, too. Not as light as what I do in other books, so I can see greater content changes, but not that much as with new editions.

…but the conversations are ongoing and the results possibly nothing to be elaborated on here [at first, and then O’Reilly was so kind to leave me the rights to the Little Books, which allowed me to make them living books, too!]. The reasons why I share this are 1) that the idea of a living book goes beyond errata, but does not mean there wouldn’t be any new editions anymore (in fact, the living book process can be fairly light—it’s comparable to website updates in spirit), and 2) that I like to walk the talk, that I want to have a conversation about this, that I want us to think about how we can make books more useful and valuable.

I run out of fuel to paint the idea in ever more vivid colors; perhaps we can close by establishing that keeping our work up-to-date is to keep it alive; that this way, it can stay relevant and useful and valuable; and that maintenance is one key to quality. And just as we know this about websites, we can know this about books. Living websites; living books.

Update (November 19, 2024)

I should have long updated this post to indicate that I had switched to using SemVer for book versioning. Most of the time, you’ll find the version at the end of the book, like “[1.2.10]”; you can use this information to compare it with the latest public version as given on the respective book landing page here on meiert.com, and decide on pulling an update or not (if on a platform that allows updates).

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a web developer, manager, and author. I’ve been working as a technical lead and engineering manager for companies you’ve never heard of and companies you use every day, I’m an occasional contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development and engineering management, but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my experiences and views. (I value you being critical, interpreting charitably, and giving feedback.)