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You can still get a lot of value from what O'Reilly provides if you're in their niche. Imagine the CS professor writing a book on the latest hot language. He'

by acabal 14y ago

You can still get a lot of value from what O'Reilly provides if you're in their niche. Imagine the CS professor writing a book on the latest hot language. He'll need an editor; how does a CS professor go about finding a trustworthy one? He'll need cover art; he'll need to know how to create ebooks (computers are a wide field and just because you're an expert in Dart doesn't mean you know how to create an epub file). You'd have to deal with printing your book and knowing all the lingo there. Typesetting, etc. Maybe you have amateur HTML knowledge; you could put together an epub, but would it look professional? All of this is learnable. Does that mean everyone should do it themselves? Or that everyone has the time or inclination to do it themselves? No. Maybe the CS professor could learn it all, but they're too busy teaching classes or doing research. Or maybe the minutae of self-publishing doesn't interest them. Publishers like O'Reilly exchange part of your profit for bringing their domain knowledge to the table and doing it all for you. For this hypothetical CS professor, he's exactly in their target market, even though he could do it himself if he tried hard enough. So with that said, I don't really think the bulk of O'Reilly's (author) market is here on HN.

cookiecaper 14y ago
Right, I guess the question is, "for an authorship capable of self-publishing, is your deal fair enough?" Again, I can totally see how novelists are basically obliged to take the deals offered by the publishing groups, because they are most likely not going to be able to gather the required knowledge to self-publish in anything resembling a timely manner. But with O'Reilly's authors, a publishing house is a convenience, not a necessity, worthy of a fair price, not the total pwnage and incompetence typical in the field and recounted in this piece ("...I was paying for it dearly, allowing O’Reilly to retain all but a small fraction of net sales"). So again, if O'Reilly is going to treat their authors like helpless novelists who've typed out their manuscript on an old-school mechanical typewriter and have no chance of self-publishing without years of effort and training, why don't they just start publishing novels? Is there really a market for a classical publishing arrangement when your authorship is perfectly capable of self-publishing, but would just prefer not to do so?
- acabal 14y ago
  As I mentioned, for those with the skill, time, patience, and determination, any traditional publishing deal, including O'Reilly, isn't worth it. But I think you're overestimating the amount of O'Reilly authors who can do (and are interested in doing, and have time for) every little thing required to produce, market, and distribute paper and ebooks. Here on HN we're all hackers who like to roll up our sleeves; but O'Reilly's vast catalog isn't all written by hackers. I doubt even a majority is. O'Reilly doesn't need to start selling novels because their authors appear to be happy with the traditional tradeoff. If more weren't, then O'Reilly wouldn't exist today. After all self-publishing is nothing new. Vanity presses have been around for centuries. Just like we'd chuckle at the guy who says, "You want how much to make a web site? Don't you just put a picture at the top and write some text?" so too would O'Reilly chuckle at us for saying, "They want how much for their percentage? Don't they just turn on a printer and convert a .doc file to .mobi with Calibre?"
  - SiVal 14y ago
    Here on HN we're all hackers who like to roll up our sleeves I think you're very right about this, but there's even more to it. When O'Reilly started, getting a book published was like getting a chip design fabricated. You had professionals who worked with software that cost thousands of dollars producing "camera ready" pages for printers, whose enormously expensive equipment required very special formats. And the end product had to go through a channel as a physical product being moved to tens of thousands of bookstores, because those incredibly fragmented physical sales locations were almost the only places books were sold. It just didn't matter how much of a "roll up your sleeves" guy you were in that world (which I remember like it was yesterday.) But that world is gone. These days, you can create your book entirely with free software as you sit on a beach, and you can sell it in electronic form off your own website to the entire planet (without leaving the beach.) You can do all the marketing, all the selling, collect your paychecks, and use them to buy stuff, all from that little spot in the sand. O'Reilly is still needed by some, but for "roll up your sleeves hackers", I think their time has past.
- vacri 14y ago
  Why would a novelist be less capable of self-publishing than technical authors? Do technical authors have bigger garages to keep their book stock in? Do they live closer to mail depots? Do they have better sales skills for negotiating with distributors?

by acabal 14y ago

cookiecaper 14y ago

Right, I guess the question is, "for an authorship capable of self-publishing, is your deal fair enough?" Again, I can totally see how novelists are basically obliged to take the deals offered by the publishing groups, because they are most likely not going to be able to gather the required knowledge to self-publish in anything resembling a timely manner. But with O'Reilly's authors, a publishing house is a convenience, not a necessity, worthy of a fair price, not the total pwnage and incompetence typical in the field and recounted in this piece ("...I was paying for it dearly, allowing O’Reilly to retain all but a small fraction of net sales"). So again, if O'Reilly is going to treat their authors like helpless novelists who've typed out their manuscript on an old-school mechanical typewriter and have no chance of self-publishing without years of effort and training, why don't they just start publishing novels? Is there really a market for a classical publishing arrangement when your authorship is perfectly capable of self-publishing, but would just prefer not to do so?

acabal 14y ago
As I mentioned, for those with the skill, time, patience, and determination, any traditional publishing deal, including O'Reilly, isn't worth it. But I think you're overestimating the amount of O'Reilly authors who can do (and are interested in doing, and have time for) every little thing required to produce, market, and distribute paper and ebooks. Here on HN we're all hackers who like to roll up our sleeves; but O'Reilly's vast catalog isn't all written by hackers. I doubt even a majority is. O'Reilly doesn't need to start selling novels because their authors appear to be happy with the traditional tradeoff. If more weren't, then O'Reilly wouldn't exist today. After all self-publishing is nothing new. Vanity presses have been around for centuries. Just like we'd chuckle at the guy who says, "You want how much to make a web site? Don't you just put a picture at the top and write some text?" so too would O'Reilly chuckle at us for saying, "They want how much for their percentage? Don't they just turn on a printer and convert a .doc file to .mobi with Calibre?"
- SiVal 14y ago
  Here on HN we're all hackers who like to roll up our sleeves I think you're very right about this, but there's even more to it. When O'Reilly started, getting a book published was like getting a chip design fabricated. You had professionals who worked with software that cost thousands of dollars producing "camera ready" pages for printers, whose enormously expensive equipment required very special formats. And the end product had to go through a channel as a physical product being moved to tens of thousands of bookstores, because those incredibly fragmented physical sales locations were almost the only places books were sold. It just didn't matter how much of a "roll up your sleeves" guy you were in that world (which I remember like it was yesterday.) But that world is gone. These days, you can create your book entirely with free software as you sit on a beach, and you can sell it in electronic form off your own website to the entire planet (without leaving the beach.) You can do all the marketing, all the selling, collect your paychecks, and use them to buy stuff, all from that little spot in the sand. O'Reilly is still needed by some, but for "roll up your sleeves hackers", I think their time has past.
vacri 14y ago
Why would a novelist be less capable of self-publishing than technical authors? Do technical authors have bigger garages to keep their book stock in? Do they live closer to mail depots? Do they have better sales skills for negotiating with distributors?