How long does it normally take for a book to leave "Under Development" status?

Does is always take that long for a book like this (343 pages, not too technichal, just a few pictures etc.) to move to shipping status?

No.  The time frame is always variable from just a few days to much much longer.  But this particular book does seem to be taking longer than I would expect as well.  

More than likely something has stopped/stalled progress and someone somewhere has to wait on someone else who is waiting on yet someone else to fix a series of issues that will fall like dominoes once the first one is pushed.  

I'll email someone and ask him to look into it.

Edit: email sent.

I noticed that this resource is published by HarperSanFrancisco. I then checked and there are 3 books from that publisher listed as Under Development (of 4 available).

There has been precedent for publishers holding up the shipping of resources (contract negotiations?) before. I suspect that there is something like that is going on here and Logos can't or won't comment on it.

How long does it normally take for a book to leave "Under Development" status?

If you have the funds, too long.

If you're short on cash, not long enough.

There doesn't seem to be any in-between.

[:P][;)]

 

I can’t go into too many details about the particulars of this book, but I can tell you about some of the factors that hold up books in general.

First, our goal is to develop books as fast as we can. Lots of Logos employees are power users and book lovers. When we hear about a new Pre-Pub project, we get excited, too—we all want it in our libraries. 

For a “normal” book (which, in theory, exists… somewhere… [:D]), it usually takes us a few weeks to a couple of months, with a little extra time for QA testing. We’ve produced more than 21,000 books, so we’ve got some good systems in place.

If a book takes longer than that, it’s usually for one (or more) of the following reasons:

1. Contracts and publishers. We might have an issue to resolve with the publisher. We work with more than a hundred publishers. Every year, there is consolidation, management turnover, new people for us to work with and build relationships, and so on. Even publishers we’ve worked with for years might change their strategy—pulling back from digital, or pushing ahead full steam (hint: keep an eye on the Pre-Pub page next week…).
2. Text complexity. Sometimes the source materials are bad. Getting a good source is much more complex than simply OCRing a print text—especially when you consider that the kinds of books we work with are inherently pretty complex (Greek, Hebrew, footnotes, indexes, cross-references, and a hundred other things). Take a look at the 1561 translation of Calvin’s Institutes and you’ll see what I mean. [:)]
3. Processing issues. Getting a good source text is just the start. We spend a lot of time going over books, tagging everything, and adding all the features that make books work to well in Logos. We work with lots of contractors and have an entire department that does an amazing job of turning texts into fully-tagged Logos books. (We don’t just do this for Pre-Pubs; we do this for all our books. Most of this work happens behind the scenes and you probably don’t notice it… here’s one of the bigger update projects we did recently: http://community.logos.com/forums/p/44241/329310.aspx.) Some of this work is automated and scripted, but at the end of the day, we have real humans working on our books (and these humans use the same books in our software—just like you).
4. QA Testing. Our books go through a thorough testing process. If you see a ship date move, it’s usually because we caught something minor in the QA testing. If we catch something major, it can take awhile to go back and fix.

When you consider that we ship thousands of books every year, it’s inevitable that we’ll have a few hold-ups. But most of our books move through the Pre-Pub program pretty fast, and we’re improving our systems every day to make it even better.