15 ms·

O’Reilly Media Has Lost Its Soul

440 points by perlgeek 14y ago

xradionut 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      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.
donretag 14y ago
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.
- kpeel 14y ago
  It kind of sounded to me like the author was pointing out that, though O'Reilly sucks, the editors (including the acquisitions editor) were good. The author didn't seem to get personal in a bad way.
  - markprovan 14y ago
    Exactly, they were named to point out that they "both possessed integrity and practical minds."
  - jrochkind1 14y ago
    Not true. The part where he contacts Tim O'Reilly directly, he names the name of "the publisher who replaced him", and said they lacked "integrity and good business sense".
- manglav 14y ago
  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.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - jgon 14y ago
    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.
carlisle_ 14y ago
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 14y ago
  Anything that you love can break your heart, and most of them will.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
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.
dreamdu5t 14y ago
People read books about computer programming?
- noarchy 14y ago
  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?).
  - pmelendez 14y ago
    Not sure if you are talking about books in printed form or if you are including ebooks as a form of "online docs". But there are a lot of books/ebooks that worth having as regular reading or just as reference. Few examples: The art of computer programming, Effective C++, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, OnLisp, among others. Yeah, you can find a few of them for free as a digital version, but they were written in a book fashion with the regular editorial process that is lacking in a lot of wikis and on-line docs. I definitely see space for both if the material is good.
  - Ruska 14y ago
    Blog posts and wikis are great for finding a quick fix/example on how to solve a small problem. I find books useful for when I'm learning a new concept from scratch.
  - hashtree 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      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.
VengefulCynic 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.
  - jeremyjh 14y ago
    Right and he's already banking on the fact that he has won that lawsuit.
  - ecspike 14y ago
    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.
    - RougeFemme 14y ago
      If that's the case here, refusing to print any more copies of the first edition is a bad business decision for O'Reily.
    - unreal37 14y ago
      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 14y ago
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 http://oreilly.com/oreilly/author/ch03.html
- TDL 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.
- b__k 14y ago
aresant 14y ago
"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-how-you-buy-your-way-onto-the-new-york-times-bestsellers-list/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/02/22/heres-h... 2 - http://weijiblog.com/2010/10/64-the-4-hour-workweek-escape-9-5-live-anywhere-and-join-the-new-rich/ http://weijiblog.com/2010/10/64-the-4-hour-workweek-escape-9... 3 - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9459779/50-Shades-of-Grey-is-best-selling-book-of-all-time.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9459779/50... 4 - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/technology/20amazon.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/technology/20amazon.html?_...
- randall 14y ago
  Complete aside, but as a student of marketing who reads HN, care to reach out to our company? I'm not a student of marketing, and I'm kind of bad at it but need to get good quickly. I'm curious about you as a person, and want to understand that world better so we can either acquire the right skills ourselves, or hire someone who can help us understand. Care to shoot me an email? Email is in my profile.
- neves 14y ago
  Yes, I've bought dozens of US0.00 books from Amazon!
  - MarkMc 14y ago
    The linked article excludes free e-books when comparing sales of digital and paper books. And that article is now 2 years old - it would be interesting to know the current sales ratio between paper and digital books.
majani 14y ago
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_ 14y ago
  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.
- saintx 14y ago
  Not anarchist, but disruptive. The attitude comes from five decades of technology innovation rapidly rendering its competition utterly obsolete without warning. Picasso once said "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge", and the hacker community understands that the urge to create is also a destructive urge.
- ImprovedSilence 14y ago
  Um... you realize this is a news site for STARTUPS. The entire point of which is to develop new business models and "kill" incumbent competitors. So I guess we like to focus on the mortality of companies, as it is often a techie who is implementing his own version of doomsday and demise on large incumbents. All through creation (new technology, new media, new models, new information) ironically enough.
trotsky 14y ago
To be clear, doesn't the typical second edition fit the term "derived work" precisely?
auctiontheory 14y ago
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 14y ago
  >>>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 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      >>>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.
DanLivesHere 14y ago
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.
- ecspike 14y ago
  I wrote my first book for a traditional publisher and unlike the norm, my book earned out its advance and gave me several royalty checks. If you take into account the confs I traveled to giving talks, it's probably a wash. I think the problem with his case is that he did it somewhat backwards. He already had the brand identity and market to not necessitate needing O'Reilly. My publisher didn't do anything other than sending out some promo copies I asked for and sponsoring a giveaway or two. Going through a traditional publisher is a good way to learn the rules. I tried to soak up as much as I could from my editors so when I tried to do it on my own (as I'm doing now with an experimental project), I wasn't so lost. Too many people look at O'Reilly as the brass ring that will suddenly make them tech-famous. The hustle is the same whether you are self-pub or trad-pub. The only difference is your royalty and control.
- hvs 14y ago
  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."
larrys 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.
  - petercooper 14y ago
    There are still handy boxes they can tick though. I know people who've used being published by major tech publishers as the core of their O-1 visa applications to get into the US.
  - unreal37 14y ago
    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.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      Look, I don't doubt that an ORA book is a credential. I just doubt that it's a cost-effective credential. A prominent Github project will serve most people just as well as an ORA book.
EliRivers 14y ago
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.
mariuolo 14y ago
It doesn't say how much it costs to publish with Analytics Press.
deleted 14y ago
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SeanLuke 14y ago
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 14y ago
  ...and how much actual sales?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - SeanLuke 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      Amazon rewards the thought train of: want to buy smart book, need device to read smart book on, buy iPad. Seems enlightened to me.
coldtea 14y ago
>O’Reilly Media Has Lost Its Soul Yes. But that was like 7-8 years ago. Around the same time Oreillynet stopped being interesting.
drewda 14y ago
The interesting parts of O'Reilly left with the Maker Media spin-off.
Uchikoma 14y ago
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.
nicholassmith 14y ago
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.
digikata 14y ago
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.
- petercooper 14y ago
  You can also legally resell them (in the sense that you can sell them on and lose your copy, not duplicate ;-))
- Scottopherson 14y ago
  They will sync up your e-book library to your Dropbox account as well which I find extremely useful.
- lawnchair_larry 14y ago
  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.
acabal 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.)
camworld 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.
- ratherbefuddled 14y ago
  I'm sure it's not what you're suggesting but low margins aren't an excuse for breaching a contract or doing a poor job of printing. If it can't be done at the right quality economically, it's better to not do the job at all which is what the contract seems to have been trying to guarantee. Print media is in decline and will only lose more ground now to digital media, which of course has a significant cost advantage. Perhaps publishers should recognise that now and aim towards a niche of fewer very high quality prints that are as much aesthetic as practical. The price increase which is inevitable in any case as volumes drop might not look so bad then.
neurotech1 14y ago
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.
unreal37 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.
Calel4489 14y ago
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 14y ago
  I used CreateSpace (Amazon). I discuss it a bit here: http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2013/02/decisions-i-made-when-publishing-my-new.html http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2013/02/decisions-i-made-when-p... 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.
Tim_OReilly 14y ago
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.
ggamecrazy 14y ago
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.
lispython 14y ago
If you would choose self publishing and compare with traditional publisher, The Lean Publishing Manifesto (https://leanpub.com/manifesto https://leanpub.com/manifesto) may be a good start.
hakaaaaak 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.
beernutz 14y ago
This kind of treatment is inexcusable. I canceled my safari subscription, and told them why.
csomar 14y ago
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.
c0mpute 14y ago
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.

440 points by perlgeek 14y ago

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 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.

donretag 14y ago

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.

kpeel 14y ago
It kind of sounded to me like the author was pointing out that, though O'Reilly sucks, the editors (including the acquisitions editor) were good. The author didn't seem to get personal in a bad way.
- markprovan 14y ago
  Exactly, they were named to point out that they "both possessed integrity and practical minds."
- jrochkind1 14y ago
  Not true. The part where he contacts Tim O'Reilly directly, he names the name of "the publisher who replaced him", and said they lacked "integrity and good business sense".
manglav 14y ago
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.
- deleted 14y ago
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- jgon 14y ago
  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.

carlisle_ 14y ago

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 14y ago
Anything that you love can break your heart, and most of them will.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

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.

dreamdu5t 14y ago

People read books about computer programming?

noarchy 14y ago
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?).
- pmelendez 14y ago
  Not sure if you are talking about books in printed form or if you are including ebooks as a form of "online docs". But there are a lot of books/ebooks that worth having as regular reading or just as reference. Few examples: The art of computer programming, Effective C++, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, OnLisp, among others. Yeah, you can find a few of them for free as a digital version, but they were written in a book fashion with the regular editorial process that is lacking in a lot of wikis and on-line docs. I definitely see space for both if the material is good.
- Ruska 14y ago
  Blog posts and wikis are great for finding a quick fix/example on how to solve a small problem. I find books useful for when I'm learning a new concept from scratch.
- hashtree 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.

VengefulCynic 14y ago

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 14y ago
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.
- jeremyjh 14y ago
  Right and he's already banking on the fact that he has won that lawsuit.
- ecspike 14y ago
  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.
  - RougeFemme 14y ago
    If that's the case here, refusing to print any more copies of the first edition is a bad business decision for O'Reily.
  - unreal37 14y ago
    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 14y ago

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 http://oreilly.com/oreilly/author/ch03.html

TDL 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.
b__k 14y ago

aresant 14y ago

"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-how-you-buy-your-way-onto-the-new-york-times-bestsellers-list/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/02/22/heres-h... 2 - http://weijiblog.com/2010/10/64-the-4-hour-workweek-escape-9-5-live-anywhere-and-join-the-new-rich/ http://weijiblog.com/2010/10/64-the-4-hour-workweek-escape-9... 3 - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9459779/50-Shades-of-Grey-is-best-selling-book-of-all-time.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9459779/50... 4 - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/technology/20amazon.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/technology/20amazon.html?_...

randall 14y ago
Complete aside, but as a student of marketing who reads HN, care to reach out to our company? I'm not a student of marketing, and I'm kind of bad at it but need to get good quickly. I'm curious about you as a person, and want to understand that world better so we can either acquire the right skills ourselves, or hire someone who can help us understand. Care to shoot me an email? Email is in my profile.
neves 14y ago
Yes, I've bought dozens of US0.00 books from Amazon!
- MarkMc 14y ago
  The linked article excludes free e-books when comparing sales of digital and paper books. And that article is now 2 years old - it would be interesting to know the current sales ratio between paper and digital books.

majani 14y ago

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_ 14y ago
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.
saintx 14y ago
Not anarchist, but disruptive. The attitude comes from five decades of technology innovation rapidly rendering its competition utterly obsolete without warning. Picasso once said "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge", and the hacker community understands that the urge to create is also a destructive urge.
ImprovedSilence 14y ago
Um... you realize this is a news site for STARTUPS. The entire point of which is to develop new business models and "kill" incumbent competitors. So I guess we like to focus on the mortality of companies, as it is often a techie who is implementing his own version of doomsday and demise on large incumbents. All through creation (new technology, new media, new models, new information) ironically enough.

trotsky 14y ago

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

auctiontheory 14y ago

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 14y ago
>>>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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    >>>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.

DanLivesHere 14y ago

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.

ecspike 14y ago
I wrote my first book for a traditional publisher and unlike the norm, my book earned out its advance and gave me several royalty checks. If you take into account the confs I traveled to giving talks, it's probably a wash. I think the problem with his case is that he did it somewhat backwards. He already had the brand identity and market to not necessitate needing O'Reilly. My publisher didn't do anything other than sending out some promo copies I asked for and sponsoring a giveaway or two. Going through a traditional publisher is a good way to learn the rules. I tried to soak up as much as I could from my editors so when I tried to do it on my own (as I'm doing now with an experimental project), I wasn't so lost. Too many people look at O'Reilly as the brass ring that will suddenly make them tech-famous. The hustle is the same whether you are self-pub or trad-pub. The only difference is your royalty and control.
hvs 14y ago
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."

larrys 14y ago

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 14y ago
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.
- petercooper 14y ago
  There are still handy boxes they can tick though. I know people who've used being published by major tech publishers as the core of their O-1 visa applications to get into the US.
- unreal37 14y ago
  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.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    Look, I don't doubt that an ORA book is a credential. I just doubt that it's a cost-effective credential. A prominent Github project will serve most people just as well as an ORA book.

EliRivers 14y ago

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.

mariuolo 14y ago

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

deleted 14y ago

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SeanLuke 14y ago

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 14y ago
...and how much actual sales?
- deleted 14y ago
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- SeanLuke 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    Amazon rewards the thought train of: want to buy smart book, need device to read smart book on, buy iPad. Seems enlightened to me.

coldtea 14y ago

>O’Reilly Media Has Lost Its Soul Yes. But that was like 7-8 years ago. Around the same time Oreillynet stopped being interesting.

drewda 14y ago

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

Uchikoma 14y ago

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.

nicholassmith 14y ago

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.

digikata 14y ago

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.

petercooper 14y ago
You can also legally resell them (in the sense that you can sell them on and lose your copy, not duplicate ;-))
Scottopherson 14y ago
They will sync up your e-book library to your Dropbox account as well which I find extremely useful.
lawnchair_larry 14y ago
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.

acabal 14y ago

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 14y ago
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.)

camworld 14y ago

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 14y ago
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.
ratherbefuddled 14y ago
I'm sure it's not what you're suggesting but low margins aren't an excuse for breaching a contract or doing a poor job of printing. If it can't be done at the right quality economically, it's better to not do the job at all which is what the contract seems to have been trying to guarantee. Print media is in decline and will only lose more ground now to digital media, which of course has a significant cost advantage. Perhaps publishers should recognise that now and aim towards a niche of fewer very high quality prints that are as much aesthetic as practical. The price increase which is inevitable in any case as volumes drop might not look so bad then.

neurotech1 14y ago

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.

unreal37 14y ago

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 14y ago
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.

Calel4489 14y ago

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 14y ago
I used CreateSpace (Amazon). I discuss it a bit here: http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2013/02/decisions-i-made-when-publishing-my-new.html http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2013/02/decisions-i-made-when-p... 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.

Tim_OReilly 14y ago

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.

ggamecrazy 14y ago

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.

lispython 14y ago

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

hakaaaaak 14y ago

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 14y ago
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.

beernutz 14y ago

This kind of treatment is inexcusable. I canceled my safari subscription, and told them why.

csomar 14y ago

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.

c0mpute 14y ago

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.