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Subject: Technical dive sites Rick Williams wrote: > I have a publisher interested in this project and I would consider > placing the data online sometime after the book is published. I can > assure you that this is something that the publisher will insist on. I > certainly intend to list everyone who contributes sites to the project > and I will be needing photos which I will pay for. It may be just me but I am not entirely happy with this concept. If all the information is coming in over the internet it seems wrong to withhold it for commercial reasons from the very people who are supplying parts of the information. It also seems wrong to ask us to supply information on sites and countries Rick has never been to so that he can publish a book. It wouldn't be so bad if it were some minor section for which he just needed some extra info, but we are talking the whole book here. He is going to take the information, edit it and submit it for publication without the original author getting a chance to approve the final version. It seems to me you are planning to get the internet to write your book for you and that doesn't seem right to me. And we haven't even discussed who'll be making money out of this. IMO the only way to do a project like this properly would be to do it as a joint project. Collect sections from around the world and publish them as a collection of contributing authors. Okay you need someone to act as overall editor to ensure some consistency, but the information in each section must come first hand from people who have dived and experienced the locations concerned. Give full credit to each contributor for their work, not just some note at the front of the book thanking a great long list of people for contributing with no real idea of what they did or what they really contributed. You may even end up with something useful like the Mixed Gas book - and if you don't rush it too much it may even be correct, unlike the Mixed Gas book :-). Actually I've considered this, as I suppose many others have too. I think the difference with me would be that I would like to see it done as an information sharing, non-profit exercise, purely to collate all that information and make it available in one place. In fact, I'm sorely tempted to suggest it. How about the Australians doing an Australian guide and we can do a European one. It makes more sense than getting an American to do it. You guys in the US can do a US one. Then we can talk to a publisher and issue a box set :-) Alternatively, how about everyone sending me their experiences of wreck diving in the US and I'll publish the "Master Guide to US Wrecks". It's no worse than what Rick is proposing. If this exercise were simply to build a publicly available database then fine but I'm absolutely against doing it for commercial reasons. If, after the database is built, someone thinks it is a good idea to make the information available to a wider audience in the form of a book then we'd have to discuss it. > I will also try and give a short overview of diving practices for > a given country based on information suppled. How can you possibly give an overview of the diving practices for countries of which you have no experience. You will have no idea of the perspective of the person giving the information. Some people may have certain prejudices against their local agency others may praise them because they know nothing else. The agencies themselves will all declare themselves as wonderful. You cannot look at the training schedules and judge the effectiveness of an agency or the practices in a country. As we all repeat to every novice on rec.scuba; it is not the agency it is the people from it that count. Also, diving in different countries involves very different attitudes. I would be inclined to say that US diving is the most organised and regulated in the world. For example, in the US you may get asked for cert. cards before you can get a fill. Here, I have a key to the compressor of one of the local shops and I go up and fill my own cylinders whenever I like. I pay them some other time if the shop is open when I'm passing. Alan
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