No, this is not a new title from the great Wiley Publishing organization (201 years old and going strong) – not unless they invite me to write it anyway. When Wiley bought IDG books, it acquired one of the modern publishing industry’s greatest success stories. So successful, there was room for a parallel series from MacMillan – The ‘Complete Idiot’s’ guides.

I confess, I’ve bought a few over the years including the very first title ‘DOS for Dummies.’ Yes, Microsoft’s first quick-and-dirty operating system spawned a publishing tsunami; initially covering computer education ‘for the rest of us,’ (i.e. non-geeks), and today with over 1,000 titles in 39 languages creating a global idiocracy exploring almost every niche, nook and cranny of human experience. ‘For Dummies’ in Icelandic is Fynir kjána and in Polish is Dla opomych. I have no idea why I just told you that.

Of course, the publishers are smart enough to know their customers are neither dummies nor idiots. The genre was a stroke of marketing genius, building on over 50 years’ success of Hodder’s ‘Teach Yourself’ books – which continue to be published. But when pesky PCs with partitioned DOS drives started cropping up on desks, ‘teaching yourself’ was not a popular choice. We just wanted the darn computers to work and not crash; we felt intimidated by having the power of ENIAC on our desktops. We personally owned more number-crunching ability than the entire Manhattan Project and were quite prepared to be gently ribbed as ‘dummies’ and ‘idiots’ in order to acquire just enough knowledge.

The rest is publishing history and the ‘easy guide’ genre continues to sell well, defying a move for this kind of information to shift onto the ‘net. Approaching 180 million copies of the ‘Dummies’ titles alone have been sold worldwide.

But the book: ‘Digital Printing for Dummies’ does not appear to exist for commercial print. If it did, what would it say? First, buy your shiny new box? Or first, built your network with W2P? Would it advocate exclusively a TCO (Total Cost of Operation) costing approach so every page turns a profit; or would it say “be a real dummy and follow the offset pricing trends?” Would it say “accurate colour does not matter,” and “the way to win business is to be cheaper than the other guy?” Or would it say that it’s the business you say “no” to in digital that helps your bottom line. Would it position printing as a manufacturing or craft-based business, or advocate a total customer service model? There must be hundreds more.

What do you think?