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I purchased this book last night at the local Borders, and thought the concept was brilliant.

I was excited to see that the book was already up to update 2, so I downloaded the PDFs and got to work. After figuring out how to get the update to print double sided in my single sided printer (some basic instructions on the uptodate site on the proper Acrobat reader print settings would have been quite helpful) I used the included paper and had my updates in hand.

After getting a few pages into it, I realized that some of the page content in the update weren't matching up with the previous content in the book.

After some hunting around, I realized that this update assumed that I had already done the update 1 changes to the book.

While I understand that for people that have following along since the beginning, and only need the incremental changes. But for new buyers of your book, having a full update to the current version should be a requirement. Ideally you would also be able to get rolled up version of changes from any update version to the current one as well. Since the author makes a point of talking about having to learn a new XML format for defining the content of the book, presumably you have an automated diffing process that should make this trivial.

Besides just the convienience of having a rollup, it is important from a conservation standpoint as well (both conserving the non-standard blank paper that came with the book, as well as general environmental friendliness). I looked carefully at both the update 1 and update 2 changes, and of the 78 pages included in update 1, 46 of them are replaced again in update 2, leaving only 32 pages that I actually need from update 1.

I'm now going through and printing just those pages out, but it has taken my hope of a quick update and turned it into a multi-hour chore.

For other people running into this, here are the pages that you need from update 1 before applying update 2:
1.1.3-1.1.6
1.4.1-1.4.2
2.1.1–2.1.2, 2.1.25–2.1.28
2.6.1-2.6.20

Again, I really like the concept, but the biggest impediment to it being successful is how much work are people going to be willing to do in order to keep their book up-to-date. If you want this to be successful, you need to make it as painless as possible.