Pasoleati,
Your not that bright are you, You are comparing work done now with all the technology available to the old manual methods used to produce most of the Putnam books. A bit like comparing an Airbus 300 to a ford tri-motor.
It is quite easy to put together a book now using the internet and computer assisted publishing, it was very different up to the 1980's. Agrred many of the authors had a background in the aviation industry but when they produced most of there work they were proffessional writers. Some of the self published books on aviation that nearly always end up being marketed via e-bay are example of the type of author you refer to - but most are absolute crap.
You have the idealised, nearly fairytale, view of how these books came to be written with the author rushing home after work and churning out extensive work of aviation history. Yes there were a few like this but not many and they took many years to do each book.
Books like the Putnams are most often contracted before any work takes place with the publisher approuching an appropriate person to undertake the task. The Publisher wants the turnover of their investment quickly - so they choose proffesional writers/historians to do the job - not some amatuer who thinks they can do the job.
I have worked in publishing and know what goes into the creation of published item, including the required researchers - do you think Lockheed-Martin, the British Ministry of Defence or Dassault Avaition would allow anyone to go through their archives - in many cases you have to be an accreditted historian or reseacher to get through the door and the due to the pre-computer filing systems it can take weeks, month or even longer to find appropriate information. This is what reseachers do they find the data that the author then uses to create their books.
A challenge - who are these authors you know and the books they have written I will compare them to the Putnam range for quality of input. I take it they do use primary sources of information, not other people books, articles or just the internet.
To my original post - Putnam style books have fadied away because the publishers are no longer funding the processes and staffing required to create these books. If these were still being written at no cost to the publihers then there would be new Putnam books every few months But that aint happening is it - why because of what I ahve put in these post. With respect to your theory on how these books are created new books should still be appearing every few months but its many years since the last of these books - tell me why this is so.
You have only just entered this forum and seem to have an attitude - your not from the Black Sun supporters group are you?
