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We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to - Somerset Maugham
Meet the book bloke who made it big on the Web
THERE'S A CERTAIN irony that one of the most successful businesses that's grown up with the Net is a book publisher, the kind of business so many people now think the Net will doom to extinction.
In a chance meeting at a London show in 1997, Tim O'Reilly explained the secret of his burgeoningly successful publishing business: "I publish books people have to buy." That remains one of his company's guiding principles, along with publishing in areas where the company can offer "significant unique value."
O'Reilly is a notorious book lover; it's hard to come up with a title of any note that he hasn't read. He founded O'Reilly Publishing in 1978 and quickly became famous for publishing the kind of reference books geeks couldn't find anywhere else. The company has continued to branch out, including launching a long line of successful conferences.
In 2009, O'Reilly says the company's most successful books tend to be either learning titles such as its Headverse series, or in its entertainment-based Make line, which includes books, a magazine, and a conference. "Sixty-five thousand people came to the last Maker Faire," he said.
But, he adds, voicing a principle that drives the choice of speakers at the company's annual Emerging Technology conferences, "The deeper idea we've been exploring throughout all aspects of the company is the idea that a lot of times the most interesting technology can be discovered by what people do with it for fun. It's not clear yet what the entrepreneurial opportunity is in synthetic biology – but it is really clear that thousands of highschool students are doing genetic engineering, and that means that's fundamentally interesting because it has people engaged with it. Make is the same way. Playing with sensors and robotics, how to instrument the planet – and then sure enough along comes IBM four years later and its big thing is smarter planet initiatives."
Similarly, he says, "Open-source hardware is telling us something about the future of manufacturing – playing with mass customisation in various ways." This trend began with sites like Threadless, in which communities collaborate and vote on T-shirt designs; now there are all sorts of start-ups enabling people to design items for manufacturing. "That's open-source hardware. People are realising there's no real advantage in owning the design. The cost may come down if more people use and manufacture the parts."
One technology that has never achieved the success projected for it, however, is ebooks. O'Reilly had a lot of success with its Safari line, launched in 2001, but these didn't get counted as ebooks because they were sold as a subscription channel for online reading. "For years, Safari was bigger than the entire reported size of the book market. Our idea there was based simply on watching TV – subscription channels way outpaced the growth of pay-per-view. The value of having a large aggregate body of information was huge. What can you do better online that you can't do in print? Search a lot of content. It is our second biggest channel - behind only Amazon - for O'Reilly in terms of revenue back to our office."
Ebooks in the more traditional downloadable sense, he says, are finally beginning to take off – and the agent of that change is largely the iPhone. O'Reilly quickly spotted the iPhone as a possible ebook reader, and began by releasing iPhone: The Missing Manual for the iPhone's Stanza app.
"Immediately, it shot to the top of the charts." Its sales rate would have made it one of the top computer books, and so would the revenue it was generating – and it sold at only $4.99. So we said this was a real channel. I always believed that among ebook readers a general purpose device like a phone would probably end up outperforming a special-purpose device like the Kindle."
While everybody who's tried one likes the Kindle, he adds, the iPhone and Stanza has blown past it. "Looking a little further ahead, it's hard to believe we're not going to have some kind of breakthrough in heads-up technology projected onto your eye. Look at the wearable computing people." µ
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It's not headverse, it's Head First...
The Head First series is an awesome way top pick up knowledge since they use plenty of examples and clear-speak explanations (with lots of pictures!). Great for those who get bored easily.
a fine bloke he is! best to family, and a shout out from us up here in nor cal!
I worked for a Certain Other Publisher (well known for putting photos of the authors on the covers) which died, horribly, in the flames of a million burning copies of 'Beginning COBOL.NET', back in March 2003, and so I know how very narrow the margins can be on computer books. In fact, that whole 'author photos' thing only started, because it saved having to pay royalties to anyone (the animals on Tim's books happen to all come from the royalty-free 'Dover Pictorial Archives'). That said, Tim O'Reilly has always been very big on quality, despite this. While Wrox books were little more than glorified Word documents, things like that the lay-flat binding, O'Reilly gets his printers, Malloy and Courier, to do for him adds both cost and value to a book. You have to be sure of selling x many copies, just to cover the cost of adding that binding to the print run. That means you have to be printing something that can command it's market place: usually based on merit, alone. Yes, you might happen to have the definitive title on LISP E-Commerce, but since you'll probably need at least three authors, just to write the damn thing for you, your potential audience has already gone down by three before you've even begun editing. As someone who worked for a rival that didn't survive (the titles bearing the Wrox brand, now, are simply badged-up Wiley titles) I have to say that I hope to see O'Reilly books on the shelves for many years to come. An IT industry without O'Reilly books is like the grin without the cat. I barely ever look at any of my old Wrox books, any more, but there are O'Reilly titles, I own, that say they were printed in 1997 on the inside cover, that I still refer to. That's worth a bind of lay flat binding.
I hate headfirst books, if only for the stupid photos they use and the layout.
The pictures are intrusive and the content of them is stupid at best, and not only that, but they get in the middle of the reading too, totally distracting you from the content.
Now this isn't controversy, is just my preference. I'd read an o'reilly or wrox book any day, but headfirst, well, they're hideous.
An excolleague reminds me that O'Reilly's covers no longer come from the Dover Archive, but actually get produced, specially, by in-house artists at O'Reilly's Cambridge offices, to reproduce the original look and feel of those first O'Reilly titles. People have come to trust those covers... So what started out as a cost-saving exercise has become another extra overhead. Law of unintended outcomes.
I remember many years ago buying a Wrox book - i think it was for VB 6 - and being very impressed, so much so that I looked specifically for Wrox books from then on.
Note that it was actually written by Wrox.
Then years later I got a book PUBLISHED by Wrox, on VB.net.
I was flabbergasted at how bad it was! It seemed like it hadn't been written by a human at all -- it was if someone had used reflector to expose all the underlying code, tidied it up a little, added a preface, and voila! they had a shitty book. It cost me around $80 and from then on I never bought another Wrox book (Note that the book had TWO authors listed.)
Since then I've found out that indeed some people are now publishing books that are NOT written by human authors; in fact there's a famous guy whose name I can't remember who has more than 200 books under his name. Turned out what he really wrote was some specialist AI routines that collate information into "books". And now his AI writes "books" for him that are little more than recitations of facts. It seems some other publishers are now experimenting with the same thing.
Beware! There's nothing like a human author. Note I'm not being speciesist - the AI "books" read like tooltips or syntax lists condensed by the thousands into a "book" .
Ever since those very first 'Revolutionary' titles, on Assembly Language and COBOL (written by Russian authors who often displayed a quite alarmingly tenuous grasp of the English language) the editorial process at Wrox was to tear the content appart, rewrite the text, provide new code examples, or add in those extra details about how to get the examples working on Windows 95, Windows ME, a Mac, in Netscape... or any number of similar 'minor technical details' that the 'athour' hadn't thought about. Even our indexers would often flag up problems with the content and get it corrected. One Visual Basic book, in particular (whose 'author' still does the Microsoft conference circuit - based largely on the success of this ONE title) barely contains ANY text written by the man, at all. It was actually written, for him, by his lead technical editor - a young woman by the name of Kate Hall - simply because he never provided any copy on time! In some cases, you just need some well-known name to stick on the cover. I believe other succesful IT publishers (O'Reilly, Apress) follow the same basic approach. Think on that, next time you thumb through the pages of a computer book and imagine it to be the work of some solitary genius. You don't need crappy AI to provide you with bad copy, believe me. You were often glad to get any copy, at all.