Relative cost of Drupal books in different countries
The relative cost of a Drupal book can be prohibitively expensive in some countries. Here, a Drupaler from a high income country (Italy) offers to buy new Drupal 6 module development book for Drupaler in low income country (India). See http://drupal.org/node/260841#comment-869592.
The book comes to about 2200 rupees at the quoted price, which is relatively very expensive. The book is $29 on Amazon.com, which would be about 1240 rupees. Consider that a bus fare in Bangalore, India is 3 or 4 rupees, so the book is equivalent to about 310 trips. Now, in Washington, DC, a bus fare is $1.25 if you use your Smart Trip card. The Drupal book is equivalent to about 23 bus trips in Washington, DC. It’s great to see the community help fix market failures.
There’s room for a good, cheap or free book to be made and maintained, then translated, w/ each release of Drupal. The book could be authored and edited by a small group of experts, and translated by professionals, but offered at little to no cost (advertising). It would be a very popular resource.
This resource may actually be the Drupal Handbook itself. The Drupal Handbook provides some good documentation, for example:
The last example link is about “Adding your own extra _submit or function using hook_form_alter” and is a great example where user-generated feedback becomes added value; when you find a section like this that gets into the details of how to work around an issue like the system_settings_form issue discussed in the comments, readers realize they’re not reading all alone, and that there’s great strength in any resource made available in this online, community-oriented format.
I know the Documentation team is actively discussing and working on priorities for Drupal Documentation, and it will be exciting to see what happens over the next year. There is discussion in the plans even for how to handle internationalization of the handbook.
