Book Ideas

Following up on a comment on yesterdays post on books.

I personally would like to see more 'technical' publications - a lot of what is published now is okay, some with good detail - but I switch off a bit when it comes to the "old trains in NZ" or "life on the main trunk" type of book - I'd like to see something like "pioneer diesels" or "EMD in NZ", something along the lines of Ian Allen publications.
Some articles on locomotives written here are excellent, but most things in books seem to be a repeat of what was in the other previous book etc...
Consider a publication by NZ Railfan "Pioneer diesels" with basically a collection of the articles from the magazine - the 88 seater, De, Da etc, just altogether and available in a book...

This has struck me as being an interesting idea, and also quite an obvious one. I can see some problems with this, like getting the individual authors to agree to it (as they still hold the overall IP) and the photograph copyright holders. however I would really like to buy collections of the Railfan articles, possibly with the addition of some plans and some detail photos.

Lets take this a step further. how about a bundling up of another series into something like North island and South island branch lines. Again the addition of track plans for some of the stations, and possibly some building plans would be nice.

There may well be a market for this sort of thing. the British railway press seems to survive publishing books with very specific. One only has to look at the list published by the Oakwood Press to see that people will indeed buy anything.