I turned to electronic publishing for my books almost 10 years ago to bypass the slowness and inefficiencies of traditional publishing. And so you won’t be surprised to discover that my next book will be called Windows 11 Field Guide. It’s a follow-up to my previous two core Windows titles, Windows 10 Field Guide and Windows 8.1 Field Guide. And as always, I’m making a few changes this time.

Here’s what’s happening.

Self-published. Like those previous two titles, this book is being self-published.

Transparent. As before, this book is being written transparently and publicly, and you can follow along, download chapter and book updates, and provide feedback as it’s written.

Price. As with the Windows 10 Field Guide, the Windows 11 Field Guide will cost $9.99, but you are welcome to pay more if you wish. Once you buy the book, you own it and get all future updates for free.

Support. I will have supported the Windows 10 Field Guide to address new features and other changes for 6 years (!) by the time it winds down later this year. I can’t afford to do that for this book. So I’m going to match the length of support of the book to the length of support for the product, which is two years.

Formats. The Windows 11 Field Guide will be available for download in PDF, MOBI, and EPUB and should be compatible with any e-reader software, including Kindle and popular web browsers like Google Chrome.

Time frame. I will be actively working on the Windows 11 Field Guide throughout the second half of 2021 and up to and past the product’s initial launch. I will publish the first pre-release versions of the book before Windows 11 is released to the public.

Scope. This book will be a complete reference to Windows 11 for end-users. It will focus on what’s new and what’s changed, with a special emphasis on “where did it go?” content for those many people upgrading from Windows 10. It will assume that most readers are already familiar with previous Windows versions and will not talk down to you.

New content. In addition to covering all the new features in Windows 11, this book will consolidate a few previous separate chapters (such as Groove Music and Movies & TV) and will introduce new chapters related to the command line, virtualization, and other advanced topics.

Projected length. The Windows 10 Field Guide is about 500 pages long, but I’d the new book to be a bit shorter, hopefully around 400 pages when complete.

The Windows 11 Field Guide is not available for purchase yet, but I’ll try to get that together quickly so that anyone interested in reading and helping improve the book before it’s finalized can do so. That will probably happen in late summer, after we get a feature-complete version of Windows 11, and when I’ve written enough content to go public.

More soon.

Tagged with Windows 10 Field Guide, Windows 11 Field Guide