Slashdot | Interview: Tim O'Reilly Answers OSTG | SourceForge - ThinkGeek - IT Product Guide - Linux.com - NewsForge - freshmeat - Newsletters - TechJobs - Slashdot Broadband X Welcome to Slashdot Login Interview: Tim O'Reilly Answers Slashdot Log In Why Login? Posted by Roblimo on Fri Sep Nickname: Why Subscribe? 10, '99 11:23 AM from the man-behind-the-animal- News Password: Sections covers dept. Main Monday we requested questions Apache for Tim O'Reilly, of O'Reilly & Public Terminal Apple Associates. Tim obviously put a lot of time into 4 more AskSlashdot coming up with thoughtful answers, which we have published below. We've also invited Tim to join in [ Create a new account ] 5 more Books the discussion here if he can find time, but please BSD don't get upset if he can't. "Busy" is an Related Links understatement for this man! 1 more ● Linux Developers ● Slashdot Dominican asks: 4 more ● http://www.oreilly.com/openboo ks/ Games How often are books revised? Open to the author? ● http://www.oreilly.com/sales/e du/ 16 more ● requested questions Interviews Tim responds: ● Tim O'Reilly IT In our early days, we revised our books constantly. ● O'Reilly & Associates 1 more For example, I did ten editions of Managing UUCP ● More on News Linux and Usenet between 1986 and 1991--about one every ● Also by Roblimo 10 more six months. The book grew in something much like Politics an open source software process, where I was 3 more constantly incorporating reader feedback, and rolling Science it into the next printing. We didn't do a big marketing 5 more push about it being a new edition, we just had a YRO change log on the copyright page, much like you do 1 more with a piece of software, each time you check it in and out of your source code control system. Help FAQ Now that we're much larger (and many of our Bugs authors no longer work directly for us), it's harder to Stories do that, but we still roll in a lot of small changes each Old Stories time we go back to print. Old Polls Topics The reason why it's harder mainly has to do with the Hall of Fame inefficiency of retail distribution. When there are Submit Story thousands of copies sitting in bookstores waiting to be bought, rolling out a "new edition" is a big deal, http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/09/10/1234207 (1 of 21) [11/5/2004 2:09:25 PM] Slashdot | Interview: Tim O'Reilly Answers About since you have to take back and recycle all the old Supporters ones. So you have to go through a process of letting Code the inventory "stored in the channel" thin out. This Awards means that, especially for a very successful book, you can't do updates as often as you otherwise might Services like. We slipstream in fixes to errors and other small Broadband changes, but major changes need to be characterized PriceGrabber as a "new edition" with all the attendant hoopla. Product Guide Special Offers There is also the issue you advert to in your question, Tech Jobs and that is the availability of the author to do the IT Research update. Sometimes an author like David Flanagan has a number of bestselling books, and he updates them in round-robin fashion. Sometimes an author loses interest in a topic, or gets a new job and doesn't have time any more, and we have to find someone else. Sometimes the technology is fairly stable, and so we don't need to do a new edition. Sometimes we know we need a new edition, but we just get distracted, and don't get around to it as quickly as we should! At least we don't do what a lot of other publishers do, which is issue a "new edition" for marketing reasons only, where the content stays pretty much the same, but it's called a new edition just so they can sell it in freshly to bookstores. t-money asks: Fatbrain.com has recently announced that it will offer an electronic publishing service, E-matter. What do you think about offering documents for download for a fee? Is this something that O'Reilly might be undertaking in the future? Tim responds: Well, we were part of FatBrain's ematter announcement, and we're going to be working with them. But I have to confess that the part of their project I liked the best wasn't the bit about selling short documents in online-only form, it was the idea of coordinating sale of online and print versions. I know that there's a lot of talk about putting books up online for free, and we're doing some experiments there, but to be honest, I think that it's really in all of our best interests to "monetize" online information as http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/09/10/1234207 (2 of 21) [11/5/2004 2:09:25 PM] Slashdot | Interview: Tim O'Reilly Answers soon as possible. Money, after all, is just a mutually- agreed ratio of exchange for services. When the price is somewhere between zero and a large number, based on negotiation, the uncertainty often means that the product is not available. In general, I foresee a large period of experimentation, until someone or other figures out the right way to deliver AND pay for the kinds of things that people want to read online. We've seen it take about five years to develop enough confidence in advertising as a revenue model for the web (starting from our first-ever internet advertising on O'Reilly's prototype GNN portal in early 1993). Similarly, I think that the "pay for content" sites-- whether eMatter or ibooks.com, or books24x7, or itknowledge.com--will take some time to shake out. Meanwhile, we're playing with a bunch of these people, and doing some experiments of our own as well. the_tsi asks: Not to start a free SQL server war here, but I notice there is a (quite good) book on mSql and MySql, but nothing for PostgreSQL. Are there any plans to cover it in the near future? Tim responds: We're looking at this but haven't started any projects yet. We've had a huge number of requests for a book on PostgreSQL, and we're taking them very seriously. Tet asks: You've said that the Linux Network Administrator's Guide sold significantly less than would normally be expected as a result of the text of the book being freely available on the net. By what sort of margin? How many copies did it sell, and how many would you have expected to sell under normal circumstances? Would you release another book in a similar manner if the author accepts that they'll make less money from it? Did the book actually make a loss, or just not make as much profit as expected? Tim responds: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/09/10/1234207 (3 of 21) [11/5/2004 2:09:25 PM] Slashdot | Interview: Tim O'Reilly Answers Well, it's always hard to say what something *would* have done if circumstances had been otherwise. But on average, the book sold about a thousand copies a month in a period where Running Linux sold 3-4000 and Linux Device Drivers about 1500. Now the book is badly out of date (though a new edition is in the works), but you'd expect that there are more people doing network admin than there are writing device drivers. (And in fact, reader polls have actually put the NAG at the top of the list of "most useful" of our Linux books.) Frank Willison, our editor in chief, made the following additional comments about the NAG and its free publication: "We can demonstrate that we lost money because another publisher (SSC) also published the same material when it became available online. Because the books were identical, word for word (a requirement the author put on anyone else publishing the material), every copy sold of the SSC book was a loss of the sale of one copy of our book. One interesting side note was that SSC published the book for a lower price than we did. Of course, we had the fixed costs: editing, reviewing, production, design. But those fixed costs didn't make the difference: when you took out the retail markup, the difference in price was equal to the author royalty on the book. The above may be too much info, and isn't directly related to current Open Source practices, but it still chafes my butt." If I had to quantify the effect, I'd guess that making a book freely available might cut sales by 30%. But note that this is for O'Reilly--we've got books with a great reputation, which makes people seek them out. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/09/10/1234207 (4 of 21) [11/5/2004 2:09:25 PM] Slashdot | Interview: Tim O'Reilly Answers And we cover "need to know" technologies where people are already looking for the O'Reilly book on the topic. For J. Random Author out there, open sourcing a book might be a terrible idea, or a great one. An author with some unique material that doesn't fall into an obvious "I already know I need this" category can build a real cult following online, and then turn that into printed book sales to a wider audience.