Aquarium Book Market

[nmonks]

Hello all,

As some of you may know, I make most of my income (such as it is) by writing; I have a Brackish Water Aquarium book out with TFH later this summer, for example. Anyway, I just sent off two more book proposals this week, one on a certain aspect of fishkeeping. This got me to thinking, why not find out what sorts of books people would want to read. Do you find the sorts of books you want?

One of my bugbears is that aquarium books are either too simplistic (for an experienced hobbyist anyway) or else so specialised they are produced in small print runs and hence too expensive.

So I created a poll (never done that before) and would be interested to hear what others think.

Cheers,

Neale

 

[BigC]

Hi Neale,
Aquarium books come in many different formats, from the informative to the discriptive or pictorial if you like. I like any type of aquarist material except for TFH books. Now TFH monthly magazine is very, very good but the book side of things seems to be very poor. (or maybe I'm just too critical)
I prefer to source my information from books, internet and old aquarists. the latter being the most informative.
For example. My bag is Killifish as you may have gathered. I frequent an old friend who has a fish house in a run down brick built out-building. His tanks are mirky and the shed is delapidated, but with his knowledge of water and other various aspects of fish husbandry, he breeds the most amazing amount of fish. Fish that are considered very delicate are bred in vast numbers. Everything is kinda of natural from daylight, livefoods, plants etc.
Sorry for rambling on, but
Old Aquarists are a major source of knowledge for me.
Regards
BigC

 

[Bloo]

If I find a good book - I will buy it. Irrespective of price

Though that said (and as much as much as I really love books) I find myself on the www more and more these days and less and less in bookshops

 

[Majjie]

Hi Neale,

I'm a big fan of books but have been very disappointed with fishy books. Only very recently became a fan of TFF and have thought that the knowledge on here should be distilled into a book/books.

What I want is discussion about fishy BEHAVIOUR and what COMPANIONS are suitable, plus PICTURES
I also want to know the difference between male and female (if there is any), what aquarium conditions are suitable and maybe what diseases the fish are particularly susceptible to.

What i DON'T want are:

long descriptions of the fish - that's what the pictures are for
very long descriptions of how to make them breed (if I get that interested I'll want another book - just on breeding)
to be given duff information:
"keep as a pair" - for Pearl gouramis - only to find them permanently fighting
"Rams are sensitive and need a calm community tank with peaceful companions" - as I watch my little male Ram chasing my two angel fish around the tank
(if individual behaviour is variable; I want to know that)

Like Bloo says - if there was a good fishy book out there I'd buy it like a shot - but I don't need one so much, now I've realised how much info there is on the net

 

[CFC]

The main thing that puts me off is price, i love having books to use for refference and have absorbed a lot of the knowledge i have from sitting down and reading aquarium books from cover to cover but i find that any books that are good enough for me to want to read are very expensive and its hard to justify spending the money when i can find the same information on the internet for free if i need to find it.
For instance i recently wanted to buy Baensch Atlas 4 but at over £40 and considering it will probably only cover a very small number of species i'm actually interested in keeping i decided to leave it until i come across a cheap damaged or second hand copy.
I would like to see more books dedicated towards the more predatory species but i guess that one will have to wait untill i write my own book

 

[OohFeeshy]

Pretty much a combo of all of them. I'm very interested in buying some fish indexes, but most of the ones available are either very old (which can be annoying when new things have been found out), very pricy, and I could jsut use the net. But it's nice to have something that you can take to a lfs to find out about anything you don't know about, which is why I wanted the Baensch photo atlas- I only really want the basic info (like max size) as a lot of the stuff I can suss out for myself. Plus most of the books available without going to the internet are beginners guides, often with atrocious and extremely non-specific (eg, catfish make great additions to the tank), and dated (reccomended uGFs over modern internal and externals).

 

[dwarfgourami]

I voted 'too simplistic' but as Oohfeeshy says, it is really a combo: outdated information, very basic information, information that's simply wrong (even Kathy Jinkings in her excellent Aquarium Fish claims that female platies cannot store sperm!), and the same information in more than one book (obviously you need it once- but not twice, or five times).

Price is certainly a factor in whether I buy books at all, but my family are quite hardened when it comes to my book-buying (medieval Latin literature comes VERY expensive) and sooner or later you can often pick something up cheap on Amazon or in a petshop (found vol. 4 of Baensch at reduced price recently).

But my book buying pattern obviously has changed as I have got into the hobby. At first I needed a few books of general introduction- this quota is now filled.
Then I bought a couple of coffee table books- from the charity shops, I'm afraid, Neale, so this wouldn't have helped and tbh I doubt if I could have justified the expense of buying them new. Again, don't see myself needing more of these.
Then I got the 4 Baensch volumes during the course of a year or so- these I have found great reading, but clearly this niche (general overview of fish species) is now filled as far as I am concerned.
I also bought the Tropical Fishlopedia- so common illnesses are pretty well covered.
The space that remains, the book that I might still conceivably buy, would be a serious in depth book about a family of fish with the emphasis on fish behaviour and a lot of information about their life in the wild, and not just the most common species. Or even several families with emphasis on behaviour. Yes, a good read, concentrating on explaining fish behaviour with reference to life in the wild- the sort of thing you wrote about mollies the other day.

 

[OohFeeshy]

I forgot to put, while I would be interested in books detailing things like wild behavious, interesting info about one group of fish, those are the sort of things you only read a few times. One book I would be interested in is a book on fish genetics, while this mainly applies to bettas and livebearers, I find it an interesting subject and I'm sure many breeders would do the same.

 

[lozzles]

would love some books on aquascaping most of them are on starting up an aquarium

 

[nmonks]

Thanks for all the comments!

Much of you are saying the same thing I would. I can't remember the last time I bought a brand new book. People do sometimes buy me books as presents (as with the Aqualog pufferfish and brackish books), but I don't usually spend the money myself.

Mostly, I get books used. Just today, I picked up a nice little David Sands book on Corydoras for 50p in a charity store in Tring. While I buy aquarium books fairly regularly, they're almost always secondhand.

The odd thing is that I would spend the money if I could find the books on topics I cared about. But I'm not up for spending 60 quid on the Aqualog book on livebearers just for 22 pages on halfbeaks. I haven't seen any good books on aquascaping either. I don't really care for the Amano stuff (pretty, but hardly suitable for anyone keeping anything other than neons).

I'd love to see a book about sculpting a tank so that it looked like a proper habitat. I see books on plants, but they either have those "Dutch" tanks as examples that could never work with the hurly burly of community fish I keep, or else have really simplistic designs, like a row of Vallis along the back of a tank and a potted Anubias at the front.

There's nothing on oddball fish either. I don't want to buy all 5 (or whatever) Baensch books just for the dozen oddball species I keep. But I would like a book that covered oddballs of the type that are widely sold but usually left out of "standard" aquarium books. Having gotten into halfbeaks and glassfish, I'm staggered by how misleading the literature is.

Cheers,

Neale

 

[Dorkhedeos]

its too simplistic and its too expensive. so its a little bit of both. like bloo said, if there is a really good book, i would probably buy it even though it costs alot. most of the books these days kinda piss me off because they tell me things that i and most people already know, like the different types of substrate and types of tanks, not as in salt and fresh, but like different sizes. who doesnt know that there are different size tanks and different types of substrates? they usually spend a good 3 pages explaining this alot of the books i see are just like 100-200 pages, almost half the pages are pictures, and they will cost $20 bucks. cmon, what the hell is that? i havent even seen a bichir in a book yet. what i would really like to see is just a fat book that i can carry in my car with the list of all the fish on sale today, rare and common, with the minimum tank size, good tankmates, their requirements and if they have any special requirements, and if there are any fish similar to it and how to tell them apart. 1 picture for each fish and if they have a fish similar to it, maybe more pictures. if that book costed 40-50 bucks, i would still buy it. if it will save me the trip home to do research, i would buy it. sorry about this rant, i just get pissed off when crappy aqurium books cost so much

 

[CFC]

nmonks Posted Today, 06:44 PM

I'd love to see a book about sculpting a tank so that it looked like a proper habitat. I see books on plants, but they either have those "Dutch" tanks as examples that could never work with the hurly burly of community fish I keep, or else have really simplistic designs, like a row of Vallis along the back of a tank and a potted Anubias at the front

There is a book by Peter Hiscock called Encyclopedia of Aquarium Displays which i looked at in a shop a few months ago which seemed very good with easy to follow guides to creating regional biotopes, i nearly bought it but ended up getting a couple more exodons instead.

 

[demonmagus]

I find that the internet/forums gives me all the info I need, I would like to find a book that I want though