On Wed, 9 Jan 2002, Joe Johnston wrote: > The slow conference season, business deals that didn't blossom as well > as expected and the death of their editor-in-chief all contributed to > what can only be called a shitty year.
Oh no! May I ask who the editor-in-chief was? None of the books seem to mention this position at all, though I've noticed that they have been adjusting the format of their books recently (not as many with RepCover binding, less color on the book spines (is the ink expensive or is this just aesthetic?), etc., and the colophons now read, not "designed by Edie Freedman", but "based on a series design by Edie Freedman", which had me wondering if she might have left the company... > Should O'Reilly fail to recover, the Open Source movement would lose one > of its earliest and loudest supporters. This isn't to say the OSS would > disappear, but it might be harder for some technologies (like Python or > XML-RPC) to break through to a wider audience. Yes, this is what I was thinking. It seems like the appearance of an O'Reilly book on a given subject could promote it from an esoteric niche into something that a lot of publishers would start writing about because a lot of people had begun using it. These research/work areas certainly weren't originated with ORA, and having ORA's blessing isn't necessarily the most significant point in a project's evolution, but the attention drawn by one of their books can't be a bad thing. . > Perl will be fine. Remember, O'Reilly isn't a software house; they're a > publisher of great books. Still, I hope 2002 brings decidedly better > news to ORA. Hear hear! > If you would like to help O'Reilly, do consider buying a book from their > web site (http://www.ora.com). Do they get a significantly bigger cut if you buy things there as opposed to in a regular bookstore? I suppose so -- indie record labels get more if you buy direct, so why shouldn't indie publishers be the same way? But is shipping cost set against that bigger cut for them? Would that cancel out the advantage of buying from their site? -- Chris Devers, no longer afraid of VB, for it does not tempt me "People with machines that think, will in times of crisis, make up stuff and attribute it to me" - "Nikla-nostra-debo"
