Book Disappearance

I emailed Gil Mizrahi about his new Learning Haskell by building a static blog generator book, and he kindly let me know about a broken Amazon link in the Haskell Books index in his reply.

The broken link is for a self-published ebook (titled “Learn Haskell Programming”) that was only available on Amazon, and it looks like it is no longer available. I checked https://www.amazon.in in case the author just disabled international sales, but I cannot find the book there either. When searching for the book or author on Google, the Haskell Books index is the only relevant result, aside from an old Amazon search result!

The case of a book completely disappearing is one that I had not previously considered, and I will think about it for a bit before deciding how to handle it. I also need to consider the possibility of the book becoming available again. I am currently weighing two options:

• One option is to remove the book from the index. If the book is later revived, I do not think that it would result in an RSS notification as long as the revisions metadata has the same timestamps, since RSS readers should still have a cache of the GUID.
• Alternatively, I can keep the book page and note that the book is no longer available. If the book is later revived, the page can be updated. Since both updates are minor, no RSS notifications result. In this case, perhaps it would be best to not display the book in the index, but I would need to add functionality to my website software to implement such a feature.

For now, I am going to remove the broken Amazon link.