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

[Sergio Luis dos Santos]

Hello all,

As some of you know me and Sandro Dinarte are researching the Weihe for a future book. We have obtained a lot of interesting material and now I have a question about how to place all in a single book.
Surely listings of W.Nr., Stkz, losses and techinical documents are very wellcomed but they use precious space and paper. When considering costs and today´s technology I´m going to suggest the following:

On the book itself we would print the Weihe history which includes its variants, all operators - military and civilian Luftwaffe and foreign - side views in color and/or black and white plus largest amount possible of photos since most of them are unpublished.

In a separate CD we could enclose all available listings, copies from technical documents and any other relevant material so the reader is free to print any of the contents he want or not. In this way we could save space in the book but not cut any item of interest.

I really would like to hear sincere opinions on this subject.
Thanks in advance,

[O.Menu]

Looks absolutely perfect !

The listing and data on CD to save money but the photos and history on paper for pleasure

[Stig Jarlevik]

I certainly agree Sergio with the previous speaker!

Of course there WILL be some English text as well, both in the book and CD??

Cheers
Stig

[John Beaman]

Sergio:

I would think that including a CD will risk all your data, and hard work collecting it, being published for others for free w/o buying the remainder of the book, as well as putting it on the Net. The risk is not the same as with a published book because scanning takes time and effort. Are there ways to make a CD uncopyable?

[Sergio Luis dos Santos]

Originally Posted by John Beaman

Sergio:

I would think that including a CD will risk all your data, and hard work collecting it, being published for others for free w/o buying the remainder of the book, as well as putting it on the Net. The risk is not the same as with a published book because scanning takes time and effort. Are there ways to make a CD uncopyable?

John, I know this but actually as soon as a book is released you can find it entirely scaned for free download in one of that famous "anithing.ru" links... Even some sites are entirely built with scaned photos and data from books so I unfortunately do not believe there is a great difference... Any other way in printing them even in a separate booklet means paper and price increase.

For a "uncopyable" CD I really doubt it. Even DVDs and music CDs with copy protection are duplicated easily even in home...

[Sergio Luis dos Santos]

Originally Posted by Stig Jarlevik

I certainly agree Sergio with the previous speaker!

Of course there WILL be some English text as well, both in the book and CD??

Cheers
Stig

Surely the book will be bilingual as well as the information on listings like the one on P-47 soon to be released.

[robert_schulte]

Bom dia Sergio

Being more interested in the plane itself and not in W.Nr. or Stkz. this proposal would be just the thing that I want. The book for "fun" and the CD for research, this would also keep the price lower.
Any plans, when the book will be available?

Best wishes
Robert

[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