An interesting trend with EDA books

Several EDA companies have been busy writing books recently and self-publishing them. Synopsys was the first to start this trend and many of their books have been co-written with their partners. A recent example was the “FPGA-Based Prototyping Methodology Manual,” written by Doug Amos and Rene Richter of Synopsys, and Austin Lesea of Xilinx. In a similar manner the “Verification Methodology Manual for Low Power” was a partnership between Synopsys, Renesas, and ARM. I was personally involved with Cadence’s book “TLM-Driven Design and Verification Methodology” and last week the company announced “Advanced Verification Topics.” I know they both have more in the pipeline. So why is this happening?

There are two primary reasons that I know of. The first is that EDA companies have realized that education is one of the biggest impediments to making sales. The more their potential customers know and understand about a subject, the more likely they are to want the tools that are implied by the books. Both of these companies have done a great job of making sure that the books are not sales pitches or even marketing instruments. It is a lot more subtle than that. These books define a methodology or best practices that are tuned to the capabilities that they have to offer. While it may be possible to implement them in a competitor’s tool suite, it may not work as well, or have been tested in the same way. But even without that, the books help to expand the market and that works well for everyone.

The second reason, and one that I can attest to, is the direction that the traditional book publishers for our industry have taken. When was the last time you looked up a book published from, let’s say, Springer. It is likely that it is priced somewhere between $100 and $150. The market for many of these books is small, so it is difficult for them to offer lower pricing. With my books about ESL, we negotiated with the publisher to lower the price as much as possible in the hope that a decrease in price, under the $100 mark, would increase sales. I am not sure if we succeeded or not. EDA companies want to proliferate these books to the widest possible audience - that is how they get the most value out of the time and effort they put into them. In many cases they want to make them available for free downloads, and even print copies to be cheap enough that they can print them by the hundreds. As an example the Kindle edition of the FPGA-prototyping manual is available for $9.99. No such deal exists for my ESL books. This is either not possible with the traditional publishers, or they do not care to provide this kind of service. Another problem with the traditional publication model is piracy. If a book is written with the expectations that you will get royalties from its sale, then I have to tell you that it no longer works. With my last book that was published by a traditional publisher, the book was available for free download even before it had been officially published. So while an EDA company may not care about this, it does mean that individual authors need to find a different model or reason to write a book in the future.

This is just another example of traditional media being under pressure. In this case it is not that the notion of a book has died, it is that the way in which it is made available to you has changed.