InTech Open - Chapter

I've been invited to submit, hint hint, "Invite to Submit", a chapter for an InTech Open book on "Optical Communications". There are a number of pros and cons to be debated before I decide to do this chapter, not all relating to current work and publishing pressures.

I have read, and indeed cited a number of InTech Open books in the past, and for the most part they have been well formatted, nicely presented in terms of graphics and reasonable in terms of English editing. However previous books I've read suffered from various chapters being not entirely relevant to the discussion in hand. One such book was a book version of a chap's Ph.D. and hence the author had room for a bit of waffle or references that were off topic. My hope is that if this is instead a book with chapters from multiple authors, distributed world wide, then the 20-40 pages per chapter will require authors to keep quite close to the point, with very little waffle and with the references being highly targeted.

While undoubtedly I can make time to write this chapter, along with performing my day to day duties and writing some more papers with work, experimental periods at work (in Madrid), may likely cause issues with my stress levels. A bigger question is if this book is warranted, given the sheer number of books on the shelves with the same title and an altogether broader remit, and more robust publishing house. Books by Sackinger, Razavi and Bihn come to mind, all of which are tomes of pure academic glory.

My current hunch then is to approach this with caution, obtain all required information, and to at least collect together some ideas for content in the interim. Depending on how InTech Open works I may also be able to approach the editors/publishers to open discussion about a more niche title, as clearly this will have a "comb"-like scope (many chapters of niche material), rather than the "stone brick"-like scope (multiple chapters forming a coherent fundamental basis for the field) of those textbooks by Bihn etc.

But... "One must start somewhere"...

EDIT: (E.F - 04/10/16):

So I have submitted a chapter proposal for this. I'm looking forward to giving this a go...