
O’Reilly Media Has Lost Its Soul - perlgeek
http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1521
======
aresant
"unless you’re a celebrity, publishers do nothing that you can’t do on your
own just as well or better for a fraction of the cost."

Man that is a powerful takeaway for authors.

I'll add a few points:

(1) I learned you can buy your way onto the New York Times best seller list
for $50 - 70k.

(2) We saw Tim Ferris A/B test his title for the Four Hour Workweek with
astonishing results.

(3) A self-published title became the best selling book (in the UK) since they
started measuring.

(4) Amazon sells more digital books than paper books.

Not sure what my point is, other than I am a student of marketing and am
enjoying watching how the traditional value of publishers, having channel
access, is being massively disrupted.

Refs:

1 -
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/02/22/heres-h...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/02/22/heres-
how-you-buy-your-way-onto-the-new-york-times-bestsellers-list/)

2 - [http://weijiblog.com/2010/10/64-the-4-hour-workweek-
escape-9...](http://weijiblog.com/2010/10/64-the-4-hour-workweek-
escape-9-5-live-anywhere-and-join-the-new-rich/)

3 -
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9459779/50...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9459779/50-Shades-
of-Grey-is-best-selling-book-of-all-time.html)

4 -
[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/technology/20amazon.html?_...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/technology/20amazon.html?_r=0)

~~~
frogpelt
It's more interesting to me that people are picking the books they want to
read by looking at a list of what everyone else wants to read.

With fiction, that makes some sense to me. (Although, if I hate vampire books
why would I care that a million people bought them last month?)

With nonfiction, it doesn't make sense at all. If you are interested in a
topic, look for a book about it. If you aren't interested in the topic, why
would you suddenly become interested just because some percentage of the
general public is?

~~~
saalweachter
Jumping on the "why nonfiction?" bandwagon, most popular nonfiction books
aren't "A Deep Look At The Mathematics Of Widgets, With Special Attention to
Foozles, For The Reader Well-Versed In Chrono-Widget-Dynamics". Most
nonfiction books are "A Gentle Introduction To Widgets, With Many Wonderful
And Heartwarming Anecdotes, For People With No Particular Need For Any Real
Understanding".

Think "Born to Run", or "1421".

Second, not all nonfiction books are true and correct accounts of science and
history. That gives them quite a bit of leeway for being exciting and
enjoyable.

Third, there is actually a nonfiction audience. Some people don't like fiction
They just can't bring themselves to care about the lives and deeds of people
who don't exist. Then again, you can only do so much focused, specialized
reading on a single topic like astronomy or Russian history unless your brain
is broken in that special way that makes you a fantastic researcher. So there
is a large audience of people who relax by reading an essentially random
nonfiction book on a topic they know nothing about simply because it's
supposed to be an enjoyable read. And best seller lists are good places to
find enjoyable reads.

~~~
rasengan0
You have a great point about fluffy feely goody low effort broader appeal
sell. I enjoyed Born to Run, but not sure how deeper one can go on barefoot
running; he had a good story, anthropol-culture tie in with smatterings of
kinesio-podiatric science. Sure seller! Irrationally predict that :-) Here's
to gooey non-fiction with all the recent expert studies neatly conclusive in
one $9.99 package.

------
SeanLuke
I went back and forth with Springer about publishing my book (Essentials of
Metaheuristics). It was a completed, edited, typeset, and ready to go volume,
and my rep really wanted it, but couldn't convince her higher-ups of the one
requirement I had: that I retain copyright on electronic copies. The reason
was that I intended to release new versions of the book once every two months
or so, constantly modifying and updating the book, and didn't want to go
through the hassle of Springer approval for new editions every month.

This was of course a non-starter. Springer believes that in the coming years
it will make nearly _all of its money_ on electronic volumes. Heck, they'd be
glad to give me the rights to the _bound_ volumes, but no way will they
release the electronic volumes.

So I put out electronic versions for free and bound volumes for people who
want to buy them at minimal cost through Lulu. It's been a moderate success in
a very narrow field: maybe about 6000 downloads a year.

~~~
OGC
...and how much actual sales?

~~~
SeanLuke
Oh, only a few here and there, but that was expected. The paper version exists
largely because people asked me for it, and because in some academic circles
you've not published a book unless it's an actual "book" (much less "a book by
a publisher").

Interestingly, I get kickback from Amazon not just for book sales but for
_other_ purchases people made while visiting Amazon via my link. :-) So
someone will click on my website link to my book, then get distracted by
something else, and wind up surfing over and buying an iPad. And I get the
kickback for that! Amazon has a strange business model.

~~~
clinth
Amazon rewards the thought train of: want to buy smart book, need device to
read smart book on, buy iPad. Seems enlightened to me.

~~~
SeanLuke
I guess that explains the batteries, baby chair, toothbrushes, foaming anti-
bacterial hand-wash, moisturizer, wireless router, keyboard, soap dish, air
conditioner, spatula, shoe laces, and copy of Portal 2. And lots of other
books of course.

~~~
tacticus
i wonder what kinda product tree Amazon would have linking various entry
points to eventual purchases.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
It's not a tree. It's a time-window within a browsing session. If you get
somebody to Amazon, you get affiliate credit for what they buy.

------
acabal
I run a website for writers. Very often we get the question, "Why should I
bother chasing a big publisher if I can self-publish?"

Then, people often turn around and call self-publishing companies "scams"
because everything can be done by hand by the author for free or for cheap.

How to reconcile these views, and those of this article?

The answer is, companies provide value to a certain type of customer.

If you're the type of person who is comfortable doing all of the marketing
yourself, submitting to all the right places in all the right formats, hand-
designing your book's layout, going so far as to demand a certain thickness of
paper, well--traditional publishing is not for you. You're very correct to
claim that you will get a raw deal from traditional publishing, in your case.

However, 95% of authors know _zero_ about that kind of stuff. They have _no
idea_ how to market their writing. They don't know epub from mobi. They don't
know that they can submit to B&N as well as the Amazon store. They don't know
how to format their ebooks. They don't know how to handle cover art, how to
find an artist, how to find a good editor. Do you think submitting your book
to the Kindle marketplace and the B&N marketplace and the Apple marketplace is
simple? Maybe it is--but most authors _just can't handle it_. They'd rather be
writing.

The same can be said about self-publishing outfits. Many authors call them
scams because they charge money for things you could do yourself or cheaper.
Well, that's fine, if you know what to do and how to do it, and you have the
time and patience. But many authors don't. That's why self-pub outfits aren't
necessarily scams, because they provide genuine value to a lot of people. The
important part is being aware that self-publishing mean you're going to be
doing much of the legwork of marketing your book yourself, without the cachet
of being able to say that someone is publishing you.

My point here is--don't expect to be happy with a business arrangement if
you're not the business's target customer. The author of this post by all
means should have self-published. Does that mean O'Reilly, or any other
publisher, traditional or self-pub, is a horrible scam and not worth it?
Hardly. They're very much worth it for the right kind of author. It's up to
you to know what kind of author you are and if the profit tradeoff is worth
it. For the entrepreneurial-minded HN crowd, self-publishing would be the way
to go.

Edit: I should add that it is also on O'Reilly to realize that he's not their
target customer. It looks like they obviously didn't figure that out despite
his seemingly long and demanding contract.

~~~
chx
Let me get this straight: the article says that O'Reilly maed no marketing
effort so that's out. The rest you mention (layouting, uploading etc) is a one
time effort. And yet, the publisher wants to keep the significant portion of
profits _ongoing_. Is something wrong here? (Yes.)

~~~
acabal
Printing, warehousing, distribution, handling remainders, the privilege of
having your book on O'Reilly's market website, coordinating distribution of
updates to ebooks, etc. are not one-time efforts. All of this invisible stuff
eats out of your percentage and out of O'Reilly's. In fact in traditional
publishing schemes _books rarely make a profit_. Publishing is a hits-based
industry even though the publisher appears to take so much from the author,
precisely because everyone glosses over the long-term invisible costs.

------
camworld
This is tough. I've known Tim for a long, long time and he's always been a
stand-up guy with amazing ethics and vision. I also know Laurie and worked
with her briefly when I was helping to co-author a long-forgotten O'Reilly
book on Mozilla applications. She's a good editor.

I also tremendously respect Stephen Few's body of work and own all of his
books. There is no doubt he's a leader in the field of information
visualization.

What I think Stephen is missing here is a discussion about or the
acknowledgement that the printed book industry is one of very low margins.
It's entirely possible that the issues he is complaining about are a result of
the O'Reilly print production managers choosing lower-quality sources and
suppliers -- something O'Reilly doesn't have a history of. They pioneered the
RepKover lay-flat binding, which costs a lot more than traditional binding.
The cost of producing Stephen's book to the standards he expected was probably
far too high for O'Reilly to have been able to make any profit on it at all
without literally doubling the price. There is a reason that beautifully
printed and produced architecture books, art history books and specialty books
cost between $50 and $200 each.

~~~
headbiznatch
Everybody makes their own deal.

O'Reilly must have recognized by Mr. Few's demands that these expensive
details mattered to him or else they would not have signed the contract. But
they did. Belly-ache all day about the margins and practical difficulties
inherent in printing a book to Mr. Few's standards, but they signed it to get
the deal and then broke their word. What is he missing about that, the central
theme of this piece?

P.S. $50 to $200? O'Reilly sells their poorly bound books at the low-to-middle
of that range. You are not helping them by mentioning what a nicely printed
book costs.

------
VengefulCynic
I will confess to being somewhat concerned regarding the author's legal
plight. He's making a claim of bad faith on the other party to his contract
and saying, "due to it many breaches of contract, O’Reilly has no choice now
but to surrender its rights to the book, so I’m free to publish the second
edition of Information Dashboard Design through Analytics Press."

While I believe that he would probably prevail, the author is building his
future plans on the assumption that O'Reilly won't sue him for breach of
contract and, if they do, the courts will rule in his favor. If I were
Analytics Press, I'd be _very_ uneasy being the third wheel in this sort of
relationship with the unresolved matter of breach of contract still in play.

~~~
mrgoldenbrown
I think he's counting on the part of the contract that he describes as being
roughly "If O'Reilly fails to do X, Y and Z, the rights automatically revert
to me." It sounds like he is confident that it is O'Reilly that breached the
contract, not him.

~~~
ecspike
There is also a provision in some publishing contracts that say that once the
book goes out of print, the rights revert back to you.

~~~
unreal37
In publishing contracts I've entered into with major publishers, it usually
says the rights revert back to me after 2 years of it being out of print. Not
immediately.

------
ilamont
From O'Reilly's _So You Want To Write A Book_ (1)

On working with authors:

 _We won't do anything without your knowledge and consent. We regard the
relationship between editor and author as one of two people working together
to create the best possible product. If the two of you can't agree, we may
give the editor the final say because we know our editors are all reasonable
people! But this doesn't mean that we'll run roughshod over your material and
surprise you in print._

Marketing:

 _at O'Reilly & Associates, we publish only one book per topic, and we promote
it as long as there is still a need for it. Our books complement each other,
so the sales of one book help the sales of others on related topics. While we
do sell a lot through bookstores, we don't think our job is over once the
bookstore has ordered. We continue to support the book with clever promotions,
advertising, and publicity.

One important aspect of our marketing strategy is that we work to create
demand with the ultimate consumer--the reader--rather than just with the
bookstore. Mail order advertising through pieces like our award winning
catalog, ora.com, is an important part of that demand creation._

Royalties:

 _We will pay you a royalty of 10% of all net income we receive as a result of
our distribution of the book, in any form, printed, electronic, or other, or
from the license or sale to third parties of any rights in a derivative work._

1\. <http://oreilly.com/oreilly/author/ch03.html>

~~~
TDL
10% of net income does not sound like a good deal at all. 10% of gross revenue
for the product would be much better, but still why so little?

It's also 10% of any form, even electronic:

"as a result of our distribution of the book, in any form, printed,
electronic, or other, or from the license or sale to third parties of any
rights in a derivative work."

~~~
larrik
Especially since "net income" is basically a made up number. If they buy a new
factory to print books out of, they can divide up the cost however they want
amongst their authors. Stuff like that. "Net income" is entirely under their
control.

------
DanLivesHere
I've been reading a lot about publishing and self-publishing, and the core
themes around going the traditional route keep repeating themselves.

The negatives of traditional publishing:

1) Unless you're a known commodity/celebrity, you're basically writing for
your advance, and that it.

2) There's not going to be a lot of marketing support for your book from
anyone other than you.

3) You don't have as much control over the product as you think you do.

There are a lot of positives, too -- there's the ego aspect, as you have to
get past a gatekeeper; if you're a writer, you don't have to worry about all
the stuff that happens to go from manuscript to book; they handle
distribution; etc. But this guy didn't really gain or care about those
factors. And some factors which would be a positive for many writers (i.e. the
design of the book itself) are a HUGE negative for him.

I'm really not surprised that his experience was negative.

~~~
hvs
Actually, his chief complaint is that they willfully disregarded their
contract with him. That has less to do with "traditional publishing wasn't
right for him" than "O'Reilly didn't honor a contract."

------
Tim_OReilly
There are two issues here: a particular dispute between O'Reilly Media and one
of our authors, and the relative advantages of using a publisher versus going
it alone. I'm only going to address the former here, but if you read between
the lines, you can see the signs of an author who imagines the upside of self-
publishing, but is not prepared to accept the costs on the downside.

I'm the last person to suggest to any author that self-publishing is not a
good idea, since I started out as a self-published author who then took on
other authors, and grew a real publishing company. But in the course of that
odyssey, I learned why publishing is not as easy as it looks, even today when
the options for self-publishing have proliferated.

Let me respond to the particulars of this case.

As reasonable people know, there are two sides to every story. Far from being
the story of a heartless publisher running roughshod over an innocent author,
the O'Reilly Media side is a story of a particularly demanding author, for
whom we've bent over backwards.

In response to a bad printing job, which as Steven Few notes, did produce a
substandard printing of the book, we not only took the bad copies out of
distribution and reprinted it to Steven's exacting specifications, which
included a specific, very expensive paper, we foolishly agreed to let him
inspect each print run. (As he notes, we didn't always follow through on this
agreement, but he continued to buy the reprinted copies, which came from the
same printer, from the same files, on exactly the same paper, without
complaint.) When the Kindle edition (which we had every right to produce)
turned out to be substandard, we took it out of print.

When he asked us to revert the rights, it is true that our publisher did
assert, as we believe, that we had the rights to produce the second edition.
But when Steven was clear that he did not want to produce the new edition with
us, we didn't fight his wish to revert the rights, and agreed to his desire to
cancel the contract.

At that point, Steven made clear that he expected us to continue publishing
the first edition until such time as he no longer needed it. Given that this
is an expensive four-color book for we have been printing approximately twelve
months of inventory, we declined to go back to press when we ran out of stock
three months short of his planned new edition.

This is fairly standard publishing practice - and it doesn't come from
heartless disregard for authors, but rather, from thoughtful regard for
customers. Most customers would not be too pleased to buy a book only to
discover that there is a new edition available. They would rather hear in
advance about a new edition, and wait for it, than buy an outdated version.

Steven's need for books for his seminars is a special case, but one that he
could have anticipated and communicated to us in a cooperative way.

We have offered to provide to him all the source files for his book, so that
if he chooses, he can arrange to print his own copies. After all, since he
plans to self-publish the second edition, there is nothing to prevent him from
self-publishing additional copies of the first edition if he requires them. We
even offered to help arrange the printing.

What we were not willing to do is to incur the enormous cost of an extremely
short run printing of an expensive book, when the need for that short run is
driven by the author's own decisions and schedule, and not by ours. We even
offered to set him up with a print-on-demand vendor who could produce copies
on short turnaround at what we believe is probably acceptable quality, but he
is not interested in that option.

When I first heard about this problem, Stephen was threatening litigation
unless we printed books for him, despite the fact that he'd already terminated
the contract. Let's be clear, he threatened to sue us for not continuing to
perform on a contract that he himself asked to be canceled. (The contract did
not require us to continue publishing the book in any case.)

When our publisher asked for a phone call to discuss options, he declined to
talk with her, insisting that he'd only communicate about his issues in
writing. And given that each of his messages seemed to have as a precondition
the admission of guilt for various "offenses", that made communication rather
difficult.

For what it's worth, when Steven published his blog post, I replied in the
comments. He has declined to publish my reply. (I had also thought I had
replied when he first contacted me by email twelve days ago, but I discovered
the unsent message in my outbox.)

Here's the comment that I wrote for Stephen's blog, but which he did not
publish:

Stephen,

While I was not directly involved in your discussions with the editorial team
at O'Reilly, I have looked into your allegations, and would like an
opportunity to respond.

A couple of salient facts that your readers of this post might want to know:

1\. It is our interpretation of your contract that we had the right to produce
a second edition, but we also agreed that you had the right to terminate the
contract. So when you said you wanted the rights back so you could self-
publish the second edition yourself, we accepted that. That is hardly a
soulless machine that gives no regard to the interests of authors. Not only
that, when we reverted the rights, we agreed to provide you with all the
design files so that you could print additional copies of the first edition
yourself.

2\. Because of your exacting design requirements, the book is a four-color
book printed in Italy, with a 6-8 week reprint lead time, and a cost that is
highly dependent on the number of copies printed. We have only just run out of
stock; effectively, you wanted us to print enough stock for only three months
of sales. This would drive up the unit cost dramatically. By the time I even
heard about the issue, you were asking for a reprint that has a two month lead
time with only three months to go before you were planning to publish the
second edition. (You had originally told us that you were going to publish the
second edition in June; in your account above, I see that has now slipped to
July.)

This is one of the real problems with the old-fashioned printing methods that
are the only ones that seem to provide the quality you insist on. You have to
buy large print runs, which don't always line up neatly with real-world
demand, requiring large investments in inventory. We've moved to print-on-
demand for many of our books (even for four-color books such as yours), but
that leads to precisely the kind of quality tradeoff that you insist you don't
want. Print-on-demand allows for continuous availability as well as for sudden
spikes in demand.

But in any case, it is normal publishing practice to let a first edition lapse
in the months before availability of a new edition. If you're a consumer, the
last thing you want to see is a new, improved edition of a book a few days or
weeks after you just paid for what is now the out-of-date edition.

In short, there is no "spite" in the decision not to reprint the book.

I'm sorry you and your students got caught in a squeeze here. Given that we
have reverted the rights to you, you can most certainly consider reprinting
the first edition yourself, perhaps using print-on demand and accepting some
reduction in quality to meet the gap in availability.

I wish you well with your self-publishing endeavor. I started out as a self-
published author myself, and built up my company from there. It's more
challenging than many authors imagine, but it's most certainly doable. But it
does put you in touch with the messy realities (and economics) of
manufacturing, inventory management, and distribution that make this kind of
difficult situation come up from time to time.

If you want to see if print-on-demand could satisfy your requirements to
produce copies of the first edition until the second is ready, I'm sure we
could connect you with some appropriate vendors.

~~~
meanguy
There's a third issue here, Tim: a perceived downward trend in the quality of
the offerings of O'Reilly Media. My first O'Reilly book taught me sed/awk. Now
you print magazines with "How to knit a robot" on the front cover.

I'm all for throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks, but you seem
spread awfully thin.

O'Reilly hired a pal to speak at RailsConf based on a popular Web 2.0 site he
built. Unfortunately he didn't build it. Also the site was written in C#.

~~~
Tim_OReilly
Well, there are a lot of people who love Make: magazine. I've seen other
comments that it's the best part of O'Reilly, which we lost when we spun it
out in December :-) So tastes may differ.

I don't know about your Railsconf issue. Please send more details.

~~~
franze
hi tim, it's not about taste, the "a perceived downward trend in the quality"
is real. i own my career o'reilly. i have a cherished sortiment of 25 or more
o'reilly books, some used and read so often that they more look like an
original gutenberg bible than a computer book from the nineties/2000s. sadly i
couldn't ad a new book to this collection for years.

for a very long time i believed that there was something like the O'Reilly
(animal books) standard, that whenever one of your books is read front to
cover you a) know more about the topic at hand than 99.9% the rest of the
world and b) a deeper understanding of the topic.

while a) might still be true from time to time, b) is not true anymore
-because the books are quite bad. and with bad i mean poorly edited (i.e.: the
art of SEO, first edition and a lot more), completely un-structured (couchDB
first edition), a scam (the one with the cow on the cover, it was the only
book i ever did send back to amazon, just found it, it was the Data Source
Handbook, 46 pages, 24 EUR, unbelievable poor "content") or just ... not a
good book.

whereby i one stood in the computer book section, studied each oreilly book
and decided what to learn this month, i now look into the other direction.

whereby i once recommended every dev-rookie every one of your book, i now
point them to pragprog.

i believe you are a bussy man, but well, if you would from time to time pick
up one of your books, read it front to cover and then ask yourself if this is
really a book worth of having your name in front of it, this would already
(probably) help a lot.

~~~
Tim_OReilly
Thanks for the sobering feedback. I'll take your advice,starting with the
books you mention.

------
carlisle_
Nothing is more disheartening to me than to see companies with formerly good
intentions turn to nothing but a burned out husk of their former selves the
second the founder takes a less than dominating role in day-to-day operations.
It just reaffirms my cynical view that companies are out for profit at any
cost.

~~~
MartinCron
Anything that you love can break your heart, and most of them will.

------
digikata
I haven't bought an O'Reilly paper book in a while, but as a customer, their
ebook delivery has been doing a lot of things right for me. They're available
in multiple non-DRM formats for computers and e-readers, I get notifications
on updates and errata, and they're priced better than the print versions.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
Yeah, I absolutely love O'Reilly as a consumer. The prices are great, they use
all 4 or 5 major ebook formats, no DRM, "early access" to works in progress
(really useful when the current print is on a dated version of the language,
but the new edition is not quite done), and they let you "upgrade" a print
edition to an electronic version for a very reasonable price.

------
xradionut
Corporations "souls" are only as good as their current leadership and "legal"
obligations allow them to be. Mostly they are amoral, since the purpose of
mostly all corporations is to make money. (Not books or widgets or
software...)

~~~
digitalengineer
Yes but to make money they need to persuide others to cooperate with them.
They're certainly no monopoly and don't posess the knowlegde and skills to
create their products themselves.

~~~
bsg75
Good points, but it seems the common failure is ignoring them and focusing
_entirely_ on the next quarterly results.

Having shareholders seems to be a magnifier of shortsightedness.

~~~
RougeFemme
Agreed. Shareholders _and_ Boards of Directors. Even if you have shareholders
with a long-term view, if the Board of Directors is thinking short-term, then
the senior managers fear for their corporate lives and will (re)act
accordingly.

------
larrys
OP makes valid points but there is value to having your "ticket punched" by a
major publisher vs. self publishing.

That may change but it still has value today. It's not all about money or how
many are sold. Being vetted and accepted by a major publisher can open doors
and opportunities to other things. Can get you mainstream media attention
which can be parlayed into opportunities as well. Selling a large quantity of
books on your own can also obviously (key: large quantity) however don't
discount the value of chokepoint.

~~~
tptacek
This is the kernel of every publisher's pitch to every first-time author. But
tech publishers run so many books every year by so many random people that
their curation value is dubious at best, and certainly not worth the enormous
cost of working with them. And, as most of the stories about working first
with a publisher and then independently have testified, there's no media
attention or promotional value a publisher gets you that you can't build for
yourself at a lower cost.

~~~
unreal37
I swear that I have been hired for jobs several times mainly because I have a
book on the shelves of book stores by a publishing company they recognize.
Don't underestimate the value of having an O'Reilly book to your name.

~~~
gamble
I'm pretty sure that 90% of the books published by O'Reilly and the like are
written by consultants as self-promotion, with no expectation that they'll
provide a return on their own. Presumably O'Reilly has adapted to take
advantage of this fact.

~~~
unreal37
It's also possible that writers start out really excited to make a book to
help people, and then in the end all they have left is the self-promotion out
of it once their publisher didn't do anything to promote it.

------
donretag
While it is understandable that the author is upset about his dealings with
O'Reilly, I would have preferred if he left people's names out of the article.
Naming the acquisitions’ editor does not affect the article, but makes the
author sound (a bit) whiny. No need to get personal, especially since the
issue is with the entire company.

I have been purchasing O'Reilly books since the mid '90s. They used to be my
goto publisher. Looking back the past few years, the only book I have
purchased from them was the Programming Collective Intelligence book, which
was published in 2007. Manning has replaced them as my new goto book series.
O'Reilly has been publishing many small books. Instead of one good MongoDB
cookbook, they choose to publish 5-6 smaller ones, whose prices are almost
comparable to a book of "normal" length.

And let's not discuss their conference pricing. What happened to Hadoop World
after they took over? I hope that smaller conferences will not be bought out
by O'Reilly.

~~~
manglav
I've never understood why people dance around naming names when calling
companies out. Doesn't that help the whole community? Now I know Tim is a good
guy, and specific people tried to waste the author's time. If I ever publish a
book with O'Reilly, I know to avoid those people. "The issue is with the
entire company", which is made up of people. When people get good service,
they use names. When they don't get good service, they suddenly avoid names at
all? I just don't get it.

~~~
jgon
I agree, and I would add that people don't avoid names in all cases. The trend
against naming names is especially annoying because it basically only emerges
when there is a power imbalance, and thus serves only to protect those in
positions of power as they continue to act poorly.

As an example, have you ever heard anyone say "I don't want to name names, but
a certain local cleaning service has been very disappointing to me." No of
course not, they'll say the name of their cleaning wo/man and trash them,
because why should they give a shit? I mean it's "just" the cleaner. The
waitress at the bar? Screw her, what do they care about her reputation, trash
her if you are unhappy with your service.

But deal with someone in a position of authority and suddenly its all kid
gloves and politeness. "Oh I don't want to be unprofessional and name names,
but I worked for a game company where I did 8 months of unpaid OT and then was
laid off after release." Great, that helps exactly no one avoid the same
situation you found yourself, so now another college grad can be exploited. If
you worked for EA Tiburon and they screwed you, say it! If they treated you
well say that too! Bad actors should be named and shamed or else they never
have to pay for their actions.

Thanks to this post I can avoid O'Reilly as a publisher, and more importantly
I can know that working with the editors named is a good idea as they were
honorable people, but if I see that this Laurie person is involved with a
potential publisher I can avoid them too.

I have a theory that this excessive deference to authority is why you can see
so many people in upper management skate from one failure to the next, as no
one has the balls to name them as poor performers, so they never have to reap
consequences of their actions.

Good on the author for actually having the integrity to call things as they
are.

~~~
dansanderson
Avoiding names is polite and professional because there is potential for doubt
in any situation, and one report by an injured party can inflate or distort
the truth. This is hard to see when you are the injured party, but that's why
these are social norms, to give guidance for appropriate behavior in
emotionally charged situations.

One of the benefits of there being a company involved is the company can take
responsibility for the imperfect acts of its employees. Blaming a bad author
experience on a publisher is entirely appropriate. Connecting the names of
individuals to a disgruntled report in the public record is usually not.

Disclaimer: I'm a satisfied O'Reilly author. I'm considering self-publishing
for my next project, but not because of my experiences with a publisher. For
my (non-design-oriented) tech book, O'Reilly did far better by me than other
major publishers did by other authors I know.

------
ChuckMcM
Sad to read. Both how poorly the author was treated and how disconnected Tim
is from the current O'Reilly. I got to talk to Tim at a conference once and
was very impressed with both his ability to see the problem through the
symptoms, and his views on publishing.

I was sort of wondering where the Dashboards book had gone, since I was going
to refer it to friend and poof it was toast.

------
auctiontheory
I have published my own book, and know quite a bit about the industry. Self-
publishing has many pluses, but it also has many disadvantages relative to
working with a large publisher, the largest being (for an unknown): building
demand in the absence of brand and network.

While O'Reilly may have made some mistakes in this case (I have no idea), the
author is unnecessarily personalizing and complicating what appears to have
been a normal business transaction, with bumps in the road for both sides.

You can't succeed in business by being this high maintenance.

~~~
mikecane
>>>You can't succeed in business by being this high maintenance.

Since when is holding a publisher to contract terms it agreed to abide by
"high-maintenance"?

~~~
auctiontheory
Going public with a dispute is high maintenance.

For right or wrong, it has the effect of making everyone less willing to do
business with you, because they don't want to take the risk that any dispute
_they_ might have with you will also be publicly aired.

And the thing is, in business, misunderstandings and contract disputes (and
flat out mistakes) happen all the time. And, speaking from my own experience,
typically neither side is 100% blameless.

The solution is, if you believe the other party is acting in good faith (even
when they mess up), you try to work within the framework of a relationship,
rather than calling out the lawyers.

~~~
mikecane
>>>Going public with a dispute is high maintenance.

Sometimes that's the _only_ way to effect change. And the _only_ way to warn
others who might see _you_ as an example and want to follow your lead into the
same damn trap.

------
unreal37
So I've been where this author is. I've had a few book deals, and been
constantly disappointed with the level of marketing the publisher does for me.
"Put it on their website" is about the level of marketing I got too. Some book
deals fall through, and sometimes I don't what I think is owed to me.

That being said, I can't imagine trying to negotiate my own custom deal that's
different from the standard terms they offered. Having final approval
authority for things such as the type of paper it's printed on... wow. I am
not surprised O'Reilly is unable to meet those terms because how could they?
How would the people running the print operation know that permission has to
be asked from the author to change paper types? There's thousands of books,
and that type of permission is just not normal. Its logistically not possible.
Book publishing (unless you're Stephen King) runs on a standard set of terms
for the most part.

The major benefit of working with a publisher is they give you money up front
as you're writing the book (an advance). And you don't have to pay even $1 for
any of the expenses of printing your book.

That's it. If you can self-publish and handle all the expenses yourself (copy
editor, tech editor, indexer, layout, cover art, etc etc etc), then self-
publish.

The publisher is taking all the risk here that the book won't sell. If you can
take that risk, do it yourself.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
I don't have experience in this area, but I dislike when people think this way
in general, because it leads to comments like "oh, that's just standard
language", and "no one else actually reads it all, I've never had that
question before" in rather important contracts.

I often feel like I am signing my life away unnecessarily due to "standard
contracts" that are highly asymmetrical, yet no one else cares or pushes back.
So, I have to grant overreaching rights to the other party and just trust that
they won't actually exercise it, for the sake of getting a deal done.

To me the paper approval seems like an odd request, but not logistically
unreasonable. If they can communicate the content to the print operation, they
can surely communicate a paper specification. Presumably they already do this
for the paper size. More importantly, it doesn't matter. He did the deal
because they agreed to his terms, whatever they were. That is them deciding
that it's worth accommodating his parameters. If they thought they were
logistically infeasible, they would have declined the deal, and both parties
would be better off.

Edit: Ah, this is a book about design. That makes the paper approval request
pretty reasonable, especially considering he had image bleed issues with the
cheap paper.

------
coldtea
> _O’Reilly Media Has Lost Its Soul_

Yes. But that was like 7-8 years ago. Around the same time Oreillynet stopped
being interesting.

------
trotsky
To be clear, doesn't the typical second edition fit the term "derived work"
precisely?

------
hakaaaaak
Soulless? Now, look. O'Reilly has gone downhill, but so has just about
everything. The economy made people cut corners and care less about quality or
customer service (where the customer in this case is you, the writer). But if
they kept the same standards they had before while book sales dwindled, they
would be bankrupt. That is the cold hard fact of it, and it is sad. We'd like
to think that quality is always rewarded, but paper is becoming less relevant,
and ebooks can be hacked and torrent'd + magnet'd or just plain shared. Any
data based business whether it is books, music, or otherwise, is in the
shitter and looking for a new gig. I by no means think that litigation and DRM
are the answer; fear and bad cryptography are never the answer. But, these
people don't have many options, and they are going to make bad choices.

~~~
hakaaaaak
In addition, based on what Tim O'Reilly said in response, it sounds like the
author was incredibly overdemanding compared to _their_ typical author, and
would have benefited from a small high-end custom publishing house. O'Reilly
would be a great way to get published for anything that is primarily print;
not a book on design with precise requirements, it would seem.

------
Uchikoma
O'Reilly lost to Manning as the top dog in the computer book business some
years ago.

It started sometimes around when they published numbers of books sold by
technology, confusing the market of technologies with their offer and not
realizing that their sales numbers had nothing to do with the popularity of
those technologies but with the uninteresting books they published in some
fields.

------
drewda
The interesting parts of O'Reilly left with the Maker Media spin-off.

------
majani
Can anybody explain why tech circles are so prone to doomsday predictions? I
don't see so many proclamations of impending demise in other industries, but
in tech, a newcomer would be forgiven for thinking that most of the large
incumbents are poised to drop dead and 'die' tomorrow. Why so anarchist?

~~~
dsr_
Because we see it happen so often. Technical companies feel much more active
than manufacturing, retail and industrial companies. Apple all but
disappeared, then surged back to life. GTE grew organically as a telephone
company, then ate a bunch of internet companies and split/merged until parts
became Verizon and parts Level 3. Software companies mushroom out of
nothingness, become buzzwords, then disappear in a morass of infighting and
bad decisions.

------
csomar
I bought 5 books with Oreilly once. Once. The paper quality was surprisingly
"VERY CHEAP". I can't highlight it enough, it was really ridiculous.

I wrote complaining to Oreilly, and there response was that "they worked to
produce the best quality.. blah blah blah".

Smashing magazine produces much more cleaner, colorful, high quality books for
the same price. (And the SM book is written by many authors).

I decided not to buy from them again any paper books. Anyone know a really
good publisher (talking about paper quality). If I'm buying a paper book, I
want it to standout in my library and last.

------
nicholassmith
There was an article profiling the author of Wool posted here (possibly!)
recently. He turned to self-publishing on Amazon and sold on a cost, then had
the leverage to say to publishers he was keeping the digital rights and no
argument as they were worth significantly more than the print rights. I think
publishers as time goes on will become more tuned to that and stop offering
any form of contract that doesn't grant them digital exclusive rights as well.

Looks like traditional publishers are going to end up doing more for self-
publishing than anyone else.

------
EliRivers
Are publishers more useful to fiction authors? There is a great deal of work
to be done in turning what the author creates into something the public buy
and I suspect it may be qualitatively different for technical manuals and
fiction.

Charles Stross (of Laundry Files and Merchant Princes fame) has some excellent
words about this on his blog (www.antipope.org, look over at the right sidebar
on his blog) where he describes and discusses the significant amount of work
done by his publishers.

------
neurotech1
I lost a lot of respect for Tim O'Reilly over the public spat with Mitch
Altman, with regard to Mitch not wishing to participate in a DARPA funded
event.

------
Calel4489
This is a really informative post. Thank you - I'm writing a book called
Disruptors - www.DisruptorsBook.com

I am considering self-publishing and trying to decide between Leanpub.com vs
Amazon publishing. For Leanpub, it is possible to sell an unfinished
transcript which helps. Does anyone have advice when it comes to choosing
which online publisher to go with and the best ways to market these online
books?

~~~
ghaff
I used CreateSpace (Amazon). I discuss it a bit here:
[http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2013/02/decisions-i-made-
when-p...](http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2013/02/decisions-i-made-when-
publishing-my-new.html) I wanted a "regular" book including a printed version
--it's effectively supporting material for my day job and I needed a physical,
as well as an electronic, version. It was all a bit of a learning process but
I'm happy with the result. And Amazon's a good platform to be on.

Leanpub's an interesting-looking concept but I'm not especially sold on the
value. Why would someone want to buy an unfinished manuscript? If you want to
flesh out some ideas, that's probably better done through discussion forums
and blog posts before assembling into a book.

------
c0mpute
I think this is where oreilly shines: Some of their early releases (and even
the published ones) permit the authors to provide the content for free on the
web.

I haven't seen other publishers or authors from the other publishers do this.

Manning is certainly producing some very good books (most of their in Action
series is good), but I just hate the look and feel and usability of their
website.

------
dreamdu5t
People read books about computer programming?

~~~
noarchy
In this era of wikis, online docs, and the like, I definitely find myself
reading very few books on programming. And if I do have a problem, Google is
faster than thumbing through a book (even if the book is sitting beside me,
and how often does that happen?).

~~~
hashtree
I am glad so many devs think this way. It is nice to take over your clients at
insane rates when they get fed up and re-write your projects in a 1/8 of the
time and 1/4th the cost.

Please, do not read any solid computer science books. That's right, Google
will solve all your problems.

~~~
noarchy
Jump to conclusions much?

You'd be wrong to assume that people who can successfully read (and
comprehend) documentation are going to be the first to Google their way to an
answer. Quite the opposite, in my experience.

Computer science? Sure, read CS books. When I want to learn a framework, I've
got no use for CS books at that moment. I'll use my experience with the
language, and my ability to read docs to learn how to do things. For core
concepts, where one is entering uncharted waters, I've found that a book can
provide some helpful guidance.

------
lispython
If you would choose self publishing and compare with traditional publisher,
The Lean Publishing Manifesto (<https://leanpub.com/manifesto>) may be a good
start.

------
ggamecrazy
I'm surprised why no one pointed out why O'Reilly is repeated over and over in
the article. I feel that he's appealing more to google web crawlers than to
the readers.

------
beernutz
This kind of treatment is inexcusable.

I canceled my safari subscription, and told them why.

------
mariuolo
It doesn't say how much it costs to publish with Analytics Press.

