Updated reprint of the English version of The Amiga Guru Book by Ralph Babel cancelled!
Some of you will know The Amiga Guru Book by Ralph Babel.
It is a large reference manual covering all aspects of the Amiga's inner workings to aid programmers in getting the most out of the Amiga. The book saw two editions. The first, published in 1989, covered the OCS range of Amiga's and Kickstart 1.3. And the second updated edition, published in 1993, added detailed information about the ECS chipset and kickstart 2.
The author Ralph Babel recently decided to update the book to finally include Kickstart 3 and AGA based Amiga systems. Along with Andreas Magerl of APC&TCP (Amiga Future) who was going to print and publish this new edition of the book.
However the English edition of the reprint has now been cancelled. I understand the German version is still going ahead though, so if you understand German you might be in luck. They have to listed on Vesalia.
The reason the English version has been cancelled is stated as being due to a Scanned and OCR's PDF of the original book recently being uploaded to P2P networks. This has made Ralph Babel very upset to the point where he didn't see a reprint of the English version of his book being able to sell due to the PDF being spread around the internet.
Very sad indeed. And even more so as I believe that both Andreas and Ralph are aware of who created and spread this PDF copy of the book around the P2P networks. I don't know any more than that, but it sounds like someone was doing it on purpose for some reason, which is just sad.
Andreas posted this news himself on a few other sites, and has been receiving a lot fo negative replies to his posts on the EAB forum. Many on there don't seem to understand that Andreas was only dealing with the printing side of the new book, and it was Ralph Babel's decision to terminate the English edition of the book being reprinted.
Some on EAB have even started a petition to try and prove there is demand for the book to be printed. I'm not sure this will have much effect as it seems Ralph has made his mind up and won't change it.
This has also had a knock on effect with Andreas as he has decided that due to this and the negative replies from the EAB members that he is now going to cancel all of the other projects APC&TCP were working on. He is now going to be solely concentrating on Amiga Future and its website.
