Fw 58 book - I have a serious question on contents.

[Rabe Anton]

Sergio,

I am quite surprised by some of the replies to your posting but probably should not be. In any event, I would offer you a set of very different thoughts and values on the business of a book accompanied by a CD full of data. You may not agree with or like these observations, but they are in no way intended personally, rather, as some considerations from a very different perspective.

(1) Speaking purely from the philosophical and professional standpoint, your job as author of a work on the Fw 58 (or any other subject) is to round up the available evidence, evaluate it, then to make judgments and synthesize the data into a comprehensible story. In this process, you must make some judgments about what pure data is worth publishing in any form and what is not. In other words, every technical or factory drawing, every marking anomaly, all the minutae of color schemes may not be worth putting into your end product. History, even an aircraft history, is much, much more than a vast collection of facts and visual images.

(2) There simply is not enough important data about the Fw 58 to justify anything beyond a nice sizeable printed volume. And that volume could include (a) list of Werknummern blocks, manufacturers, and acceptance dates (b) a list of SKZ (c) perhaps a list of units and schools using the aircraft without becoming too big or too expensive. Such raw, tabular data is traditionally put into appendices, and for good reasons.

(3) If you doubt my comment in No. 2, simply take a look at the very fine treatment of the Fw 58 found in Luftfahrt Nr. 1 dating to somewhere around the early 1970s. This article/booklet has a design history, a description of subtypes, a comprehensive set of technical drawings and quite extensive production and subtype information, all in less than 100 pages! Even adding in much new information that you've doubtless found, it's hard to see the desirability of doing more than, say, doubling the size of the presentation in Luftfahrt Nr. 1.

(4) In a very different vein, the creation of a printed volume accompanied by a CD has at least two very pointed, practical drawbacks. First, inevitably, some CDs are going to get separated from their printed volumes ("lost," absolutely lost or lost for all practical purposes). Second, there is the generally ignored and unacknowledged fact that computer technology is going to make your CD obsolete and very likely unreadable in a few years. Techno-barbarians don't like to think about this or bald-facedly deny it, but it's a fact. CDs depend on certain hard- and software to read, plus operator knowledge. "Progress" is inevitably going to kill the readability of a CD simply by its nature. Tangible example: Can you read one of those old 5 1/2 in. floppy discs from the early days of PCs? I'll bet not. Sooner or later the same thing is going to happen to your CD. My guess is that it'll take 10 or 12 years. What then? Do you really want so much of your hard work (and the purchaser's money) going down the tubes in a decade or two?

Before getting off, I would like to add that a good history of the Fw 58 is a fine idea. It was an important and historically significant airplane, used for many tasks, in most of which it apparently performed well. If and when your book comes to fruition, I'll certainly be in line to have a copy. So I wish you all the best.

RA