I have been meaning to post an update on the book, but with the new job and move to Illinois it's been difficult to find the time.  Since Max mentioned on his blog that the Professional Commerce Server book to be published by Wiley (aka Wrox) has been canceled, I think it's appropriate for me to take the time and add a few details.

Fundamentally, the book was canceled because it was not completed in the allotted timeframe (nor the extended timeframe).  Throughout the process we were extremely committed to producing a high quality programming reference.  Writing a professional-level book of this kind—especially for a product as vast and powerful as Commerce Server—takes a significant amount of time and sacrifice.  I personally spent most of my evenings and weekends over the last year holed up in my office, working on the book; I know that the other authors similarly sacrificed a lot of their time.  Nevertheless, the book continued to fall behind schedule until it was canceled.  Wiley was very understanding and supportive throughout the entire process, but in the end things ultimately did not work out.  (I would personally like it to be noted that I do not begrudge Wiley at all.  Everyone I worked with at Wiley was extremely committed to seeing this book published, and I know that they were all disappointed with its cancellation.)

A big apology to all of you that have been excited about the book and awaiting it's release.  As I mentioned, a lot of time and effort has been put into this book, and that Wrox will not publish it is definitely a disappointment.

Having said all this, I have a question for you: what should I do with all the content written for this book?

As Max alluded to on his blog, I plan on making the content produced for this book available one way or another—right now I'm trying to figure out the best way to do this!  Currently I have around 800 pages and 24 chapters of content in various stages of completion.

Given that I know that there's been considerable interest in the community to have this book (and that I don't want to see all the hard work put into it wasted) I can think of a lot of things I can do with the content.  At the moment, though, I prefer the following two options:

1. Find a new publisher to publish the book.  This would give the community the traditional book, but it would also probably be at least another six or seven months before anything is available.  The scope of the book would obviously have to change, given that we're sure to see a lot of updates regarding product roadmap.
2. Self-publish the book.  This would give me a lot of freedom with regards to the publishing of the book, and means I could probably start making content available very soon.

I'm leaning towards the latter of the two choices, although I know very little about self publishing books.  If you have any comments or thoughts on this, please feel free to let me know either through comments on the blog or via e-mail (blog@wadewegner.com).

Rest assured that somehow I will make this content available!  Stay tuned for further details, hopefully to come in the next week or so.  Thanks for your support!