A Google Surprise

Related link: http://www.my8848.net/emall/getinfor.asp?shopid=&sid=00020179&adsid=-999&gdsflag…

Trolling around on Google for news of relatives, I discovered some pages that suggest that my 1997 book, with another publisher, The XML & SGML Cookbook was translated into simplified Chinese and published in mainland China in 2000.
This rather surprised me. I wonder what it is like. If anyone has sighted a copy, please let me know.

I rather wish I had known about it, because my old site Chinese XML Now! at Academia Sinica in Taiwan was getting over a half million hits a year at that time, and it would have been nice to have mentioned that the book existed, if indeed it ever did. Actually, it would have been nicer to have been able to adjust the book first: a lot happened in the first 4 years of XML. And to have had the translation checked.

Maybe no-one thought it was their job, either at the US or the Chinese ends, to inform the author. Maybe I should assume a more blasé stance: Actually, one is a little bored that one's every word illuminates the literary skies of a thousand countries...

I am swinging between slight nausea (is it good quality?) and vague excitement (do other translations exist? Swahilli? AusLan? Yakut?) Or is that just too many Christmas parties? But did they include my typographical jokes: the dinosaur glyph or the teardrop bullet points?

Nowadays I really enjoy writing for O'Reilly online sites such as XML.COM much more than I enjoyed writing for print: fewer surprises.