I'd be the first to admit that QC is often one of the most challenging aspects of this business. Beta changes, product bugs, etc., contribute to the high degree of difficulty involved in putting out a quality book. That said, yes, we certainly want to do everything we can to make sure WROX books meet your expectations.

The multiple author solution is one virtually every publisher has experimented with. Without a strong lead author and/or project editor the results are unpredictable. Will we continue using multiple authors on WROX books? Absolutely. Do I think we can apply certain standards that will help eliminate many of the quality problems you refer to? Yes. But I also want you to know that I don't claim to have a magic solution for this. In fact, you can help us reach that goal.

As Dan notes in his reply, there are things we can do together on this front. I'm very interested in posting content as it's being developed to get community feedback. There are NDA issues involved, not just for us as a publisher but for the topic product and the software company that produces it. We'd have to work through that, of course. I'd like to see how many people would be interested in participating in a program like this and then start working on how we could implement it on a test project or two to start. We can get creative on how to credit the reviewers. Dan's suggestions of a free copy and/or citation in the book are two good starting points.

I'd appreciate it if anyone who's interested in this would post a reply so I can gauge the enthusiasm level. It's not something we could start overnight, but if there's enough support I could start laying the groundwork for it soon.

Thanks,
Joe Wikert,
Publisher, WROX