re: The Essential Blender (2007)
Dec 20th, 2011 by admin
I saw today that The Essential Blender, the Foundation’s official getting started book that I was fortunate enough to spearhead and edit a long time ago, is still selling on Amazon. In fact, it was #38 in the 3D Graphics category. I also noticed several reviews from the past year in which the people who got the book just trashed it and Blender.
Now, I’m a free market person. I believe that consumers should take responsibility for their purchases. How anyone could go on Amazon, with its copious publication information, recommendation system and reviews, and buy The Essential Blender today is completely beyond me. It was published almost five years ago, which is an eternity in the world of software. Recent reviews indicate clearly that the book is out of date. And yet, people continue to buy it.
A simple search on Amazon (or even teh Googles) would have shown them that there are more recent and almost certainly better alternatives (and not just my Blender Foundations). In that sense, maybe the people who are still buying it are a self-selecting low functioning group that are probably doomed to fail at 3D animation anyway. I mean, if you can’t do some basic research on the web before dropping your $25-$40, how well are you really going to be able to handle a full featured 3D animation system?
On the other hand, I think that the Foundation should work with No Starch Press (the publisher) to yank the book. I believe that it is irresponsible to continue to sell a product that is ridiculously out of date. As much love as I have in my heart for that book, it should be in the remainders bin at a discount/left overs type store, selling for $4. Furthermore, by reading the most recent reviews it appears that they are shipping the version of the book that had printing problems. The Foundation never publicly acknowledged it as such (to my knowledge), but one of the printings of the book had serious imaging issues and should never have been shipped. From the reviews, it appears that some retailers are shipping them*. If you ordered one of these books recently and the printing is bad (images unreadable/smudged), I urge you to attempt to return it under the grounds of defective product. As someone who worked in commercial printing for almost a decade, that kind of product should be considered unacceptable. To knowingly sell it as such is… less than upstanding in my opinion.
Of course, this may not even be the Foundation’s call. No Starch Press may have the right to list that book into perpetuity and sell it down to the last shredded cover, fifteen years from now. I certainly hope not, because it pains me to know that when someone buys that book and has a bad experience with it, they now associate myself, the Foundation and Blender with that bad experience.
In any case, maybe this post will show up on someone’s Google search if they are thinking of buying the book and will steer them in the right direction.
* In the original version of this post, I misstated that the publisher was shipping the books when in fact it is at least one retailer. The bad books have most likely not been under the control of No Starch Press for a very long time.
Wouldn’t it be better to do a second edition of the book and update it?
I have second and third editions here of very successful books that would otherwise be out of date
It would be a good idea. The original goal of the Foundation though, as Ton indicated it to me, was to “get things started” and basically to help things along until the market could support third party Blender training materials. If you take a look on Amazon, there a bunch of options now, so it seems like this has been fulfilled.
If you take a look at the official training materials that the Foundation and/or Institute has produced since then, they make and sell a lot of training DVDs. No books since then other than the GameKit, which is now only available as a download. The fact is that producing a well put-together book is extremely difficult. Now, I’ve never produced a training DVD, but I have made video tutorials. My gut tells me that making them is an order of magnitude easier than doing a book. Which isn’t to say that it is easy — just that the pool of people who can do a great book is smaller than the pool of people who can do a great training DVD.
Personally, I think that the Foundation is doing the right thing. Financing a book is a much bigger risk, and I’m not sure that the payoffs would be that much better. I just wish that they had some kind of pull with No Starch to get that out-of-date thing off the market.
Beside the large number of emails that I get thanking me for my books, I occasionally get them from people for whom my teaching style just didn’t work. My book failed them. I always encourage them to return the book if possible, and if not, to pass it on. I apologize to them, and try to make sure that none of the marketing materials led them to buy the book under false pretenses. That sort of thing is very important to me, and it pains me greatly to read people’s negative comments about “Essential”, who never should have bought it in the first place.
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I posted a warning on amazon. I doubt it will appear on the front page of the reviews, but every bit will (hopefully) help guide people away from buying outdated information!
Don’t be too hard on those that are still buying it, they are after all people that are completely new to Blender ;o)
Certainly would agree to efforts to pull the book or at least update any associated *product* information so it’s ‘out-of-date’ status is clearly mentioned. Perhaps you can get in touch with Amazon et-al?
I purchased the book 2 years ago from a book store. I knew it was out of date, but it did help me get started in using Blender. Some of its basic principles I still use even in 2.61.
Any opinions on donating older Blender resources to my local library? I’m tempted sometimes, but it can also be a cruel trick to play on noobs.
Unfortunately, I got fooled by the 2.6 in the title so I’ll take my knocks and see If I can get some tips that are relevant. Whats funny is its advertized on this page.
You got the right book, Harv. This little rant is about “The Essential Blender” not “Blender Foundations”. Although was done with 2.56ish, it is still almost entirely relevant. Incidentally, we do incremental revisions every time we do a reprint.
I didn’t purchase The old Essential Blender from Amazon: I bought it from the Blender “Store” – it was the only way I knew to support this incredible program and its developers. Of all the software I use, it’s the one that deserves our support the most: it is *beyond* brilliant!
I got the book from the Blender Foundation when it came out and it was a good source of information, a good, organized, exposition of the many sides of Blender. At that time there were much less cicrulating printed information about all of this.
I even have a free pdf in my disk. Perhaps one should “review” the Amazon site saying that free pdf’s of the book are overabundant…
So now it sits on my shelf, but it is true… I did not open it in the last three years… and (shameful confession!) in a way that I do not know
But PLEASE: MAKE A NEW GREAT BOOK! WHY NOT?
My name is Bill Pollock and I founded No Starch Press.
I’ve just happened upon this comment thread and I find it a bit disturbing.
Yes, there were some printing issues with the first printing of Roland’s Essential Blender due to problems with the files that we received from the Blender Foundation. These were fixed in the next printing which sold out long ago. However, the book market is a very broad one and books don’t simply self-destruct, so there is a very good chance that they will be recycled somehow into inventory somewhere and show up at retailers at some point. If every book had an RFID chip maybe we could track them and pull them, but they don’t.
Essential Blender is a Blender Foundation production; we simply print and distribute it. (If you know our company and our list, you know how much we care about the quality of our books. We had almost no hand in the editorial development or production of Essential Blender.)
Should we pull Essential Blender from the market? Most of our authors like us to keep their books in print, indefinitely, and we do, though this book is barely selling at this point. (Most of its potential readers are probably buying Roland’s newer book, which is probably a wise choice.)
The marketing description for Essential Blender certainly hasn’t changed from the time that it was listed for sale so any suggestion that we’re somehow duping buyers is a bit ludicrous. There are many old and out-of-date books for sale in all sorts of venues, both new and used. Who’s to say that a reader won’t find the book useful for whatever reason? We believe that readers should make their own buying decisions. Who knows why people still buy old Windows books for example? Or even books on older versions of DOS?
Certainly we would be interested in a new edition of Roland’s Essential Blender, but the book’s development and production is under the auspices of the Foundation. We cannot revise it without the Foundation’s support. Roland, would you like to revise it?
In the meantime, we have a fantastic new Blender book in the works and we are working to develop more compelling books on Blender. These books will be produced by our editorial team with superior production values, consistent with those of other No Starch Press four color books like Cult of LEGO, Cult of Mac, and Cult of iPod. I hope that our readers will be pleased.
Bill
Just read Bill’s comment — looking back into my own post, I need to address something. I said that “it appears that the publisher is shipping them now” when referring to books with smudged images. That was incorrectly stated. What would have been more accurate was that the retailer appears to be shipping them. Obviously those books made it to the retailer at some point, but in point of fact I have no way of knowing the origin of the books before they hit the storefront (remaindered? sold back to Foundation at a discount?). So, the notion that to knowingly selling them is less than upstanding should fall on whomever it was that is still actively shipping the batch of books with quality issues. I’m going to amend the post to better reflect my intention but leave a notice so as not to “memory hole” anything.
I know this is a nearly dead thread, but I had to make a comment of my own. Roland made the comment that Essential Blender should be relegated to the discount bins, and I laugh because that is exactly where I bought it two years ago, when all of the information on the mechanics and interface was still pretty accurate.
The Essential Blender Manual was a fantastic effort on the part of the Blender Foundation, and I agree with those on this thread that believe it needs a reprint. The problem with just doing training DVDs is that people learn in different ways. Me, I’ve always been a book learner. You put it in print, I can probably learn it. Put it up on screen, and I can’t hold my attention on it. Now, training DVDs are nice for those that can learn from them, but I think both need to exist.
Of course, the nicest thing about an organization like the Blender Foundation is that it is community driven. An update to the Essential Blender manual is not out of the question if you can get people to donate their time. But that, I guess, is also the flaw. As an active member of the Blender community, I keep notes of the problems or changes in the program as they relate to the books I read. I have lists for both Essential Blender and Roland’s own Blender Foundations. Maybe a thread on the Blender Forums could keep track of these things and an updated addition could be submitted?
Best of luck though, to all of you striving to use Blender to accomplish your 3D designs.