Self Publishers and On Demand Publishing

Interesting quote from  oftwominds.com

To sell a book of any worth to a major publisher a writer needs a capable, professional agent. On behalf of thousands of writers without an agent or access to one via insider introduction, I will describe what it is like for an outsider to try to gain representation. My over-all professional background: a writer of 20 books, published in New York (Morrow, fiction; Ballantine, nonfiction), and a freelance with a long record of achievement in print, broadcast and Internet media worldwide for some of the best corporations, magazines, media and similar interests. Those credentials, plus $1, will buy you a really rotten cup of coffee.

Analysts aren't too bullish on self-publishing. "I don't think self-publishing will be big," says Jupiter's Hertzberg. "Everybody's a writer or a filmmaker, yes, but talent will still determine where the market is, and there aren't that many talented authors."

Old News ;-)

[Aug 16, 2009] Reader Update on ECONNED by Yves Smith

Writing book is a grueling long, long job. And chances that your book became a hit are slim  even if you manage to find a publisher -- too much depends on advertizing...

Dear patient readers,

Loyalists may have noticed that I am still not back up to my old level of posts. That is because I still have heavy duty book responsibilities. I now know why Spaulding Grey called one of his books "the monster in the box" (in the box in those days because manuscripts were typewritten).

The manuscript was in to my editor August 4. I still don't have her edits back, but I have tons to do anyhow (this is typical, BTW) particularly because one chapter still does not work and needs to be rewritten yet again (9th time, 7 of 8 previous rewrites were major. It does not want to submit). And aside from cleanup and nailing down some very important open details (to say anything about CDOs, you need to do primary research, the media did not get deeply enough into that one, no doubt because it is a difficult product and data does not converge neatly), I need to worry about continuity and redundancy (for instance,when I talk about CDS and return to it 4 chapters later, how much do I have to reintroduce the concept for a lay reader?).

The book was supposed to go to copy edit August 18, which was clearly nuts. I had to make myself obnoxious to get that pushed back a mere six days. I get half the book back out of copy edit Sept 2, the rest the following week. The overall deadline is still the same, which is the manuscript is pretty locked down on Sept 23.

I review copy edits and can still make changes till then, and will keep editing while in copy edit. I also need to get some permissions for a few charts I use before Sept 23..

The manuscript then goes for a proofreading (an extra step most publishers don't take) and goes into page proofs, which I review again, but you really cannot change page proofs much at all (you can maybe artfully change a line if if does not change the rest of the page).

The book goes into galleys as of mid October and galleys are ready Nov. 1.

And you may remember the book is not out until late Feb-March. Why such a long lead time? They want to send galleys to long lead time publications. It takes time to assign books to reviewers. To get reviews in some magazines for Feb-March, they need galleys 4 months plus prior.

Now this book is a big historical sweep, but I wonder what happens if this ides of September is even a pale shadow of the last one.

And I have a client project starting the day the book goes into copy edit (Aug 24), so even if I wanted to take a few days off then that is not in the cards.

oftwominds.com Readers Journal - KISSING FROGS THE GREATEST RISK

KISSING FROGS: THE GREATEST RISK   (John Joss, August 20, 2007)


"Ability is of no account without opportunity"
≈≈Napoleon Buonaparte

Career choices remain, for most of us, the highest life risk. Bad decisions, early, may spell doom. The rot may set in while we are still in our teens, picking poor study specialties that become dead ends. Though we will each have ten or more separate jobs during our working life, it's better to work into areas with genuine career potential. Buggy whips are no longer made in quantity. Repairing typewriters is not a growth trade.

The most significant risk I ever took was trying to become a writer. To be accepted as a writer is to offer one's most intimate self≈≈the mind and heart≈≈for public appraisal. If this leads to authentication, so much the better. If not . . .

After years spent slaving in the corporate world and creating soulless promotional and business writing, I decided to take the plunge and write a novel≈≈well, three. Because the mortgage payment fell due every month, I wrote them between three and eight AM while working full time (for a freelance, around 60-80 hours a week). Each novel took nine months, a pregnant period to consider. When my first, SIERRA SIERRA, was taken by William Morrow in New York, I was elated. I was launched as a novelist. No longer would I need to slave over commercial 'writing,' with its intrinsic limitations and its lack of creativity. Now I could let my brain, heart and imagination soar in a series of novels already planned in my mind. I could not have been more wrong. How naОve! What delusions! One accepted book, especially a first novel, does not begin to approximate a writing career.

People who have chosen wisely not to take up writing for a living often ask me 'What's it like to be a writer?'

I sometimes detect a hint of envy, for reasons that escape me. These are, as far as I can tell, people≈≈seemingly sane≈≈already receiving a regular paycheck. My counsel to them is invariably to keep working at that salaried job they now hold and study to remain current, or become a home hobbyist with a working spouse.

Many people apparently imagine that writers enjoy a glamorous life: lots of partying, approached by agents, directors and producers eager to produce articles, books, films or TV series based on their work, traveling to exotic locations, being wined and dined by publishers who sit at their feet and press huge advances and lucrative contracts on them, rubbing shoulders with celebrities, receiving adoration from Beautiful People, being interviewed and lionized by the media, earning pots of money.

For a few of the world's scribblers, this is reality. You read about them everywhere: their latest work or three (already accepted, based on a working title, huge advances paid), their brushes with the law, their drugs, sexual proclivities and conquests, their current partner(s), what they are wearing and eating, their travels≈≈to Venice for Carnevale, to Tibet to meet the Dalai Lama, to the Vatican (private audience with the Pope).

For the vast majority of writers, this existence is fantasy. The real writing life is solitary, often lonely, with (for me, anyway) endless hours spent trying to assemble words correctly, failing frequently. And badly paid. Perhaps one of the riskiest and most precarious activities on earth, especially if you enjoy eating and drinking, clothing and shelter. I have had years in which I have earned six figures (once, years ago commerce pays, art doesn't). But I have had years, an embarrassingly large number, in which my writing earnings were in four figures.

It is not easy to live on a four-figure salary in the U.S., well below the poverty line, especially not in the high-cost-of-living Bay Area of Northern California. Once, in a burst of masochism, I calculated that I had earned less than $1 an hour in one particularly bad year; that calculation did not include work done but not sold. For the sake of your mental health, try not to indulge in such math. And stay out of the cooking sherry: alcohol is a depressant and most writers are already depressed enough.

The great, Oscar-winning screenwriter William ('Butch Cassidy') Goldman wrote famously: "No one knows anything." He was referring to Hollywood green-lighters' inability to predict movie popularity, the confusion and rapid head-lopping surrounding costly failures deemed certain winners before production and the surprising success of films despised and predicted to fail, often rejected by dozens of the industry's supposedly finest arbiters of quality and box-office potential.

The same phenomenon applies to every artistic field. The history of art in every form is littered with examples of artists now accepted as great who were spurned when they first emerged. Mozart, Van Gogh . . . the list is endless and I am not comparing myself to them. Since writing is applied thought and thought precedes any physical manifestation of worthwhile art, I confine my comments here to writing, specifically to the writing of books, though I've written in many other forms during my so-called writing life (for some unaccountable reason, non-writers always equate writing with books). So, risk takers, go for it and try to be a writer. You have nothing to lose but the roof over your head and the ability to eat regularly. 'Trust me.' Ooof.

To sell a book of any worth to a major publisher a writer needs a capable, professional agent. On behalf of thousands of writers without an agent or access to one via insider introduction, I will describe what it is like for an outsider to try to gain representation. My over-all professional background: a writer of 20 books, published in New York (Morrow, fiction; Ballantine, nonfiction), and a freelance with a long record of achievement in print, broadcast and Internet media worldwide for some of the best corporations, magazines, media and similar interests. Those credentials, plus $1, will buy you a really rotten cup of coffee.

Before evaluating the agent perplex, consider the basic dynamics of book writing in this age of bottom-line, 'pull' publishing in which publishers rarely support new authors:

If you get a great, original idea for a book≈≈fiction or nonfiction; And if you have the skill, energy and dedication to write it; And if, preferably, you're young and of 'desirable' gender and ethnicity (translation: not old, not male, not Caucasian); And if you manage to hit a cultural 'fad' window successfully; And if you know a friendly editor to straighten you out before you attempt to submit your oeuvre; And if you have the courage, skill and will to edit your own work meticulously to punctilious standards of quality; And if you can find the 'right' professional agent (see below) to represent your book; And if that agent reads your work, likes it and agrees to represent you; And if that agent knows, by first name, publishers' editors who might like it; And if one of those editors likes it enough to put in on his or her work list and supports it enthusiastically; And if it survives vs. the house's numerous other projects; And if the book acquires production values and a publicity budget to promote the work (i.e. publisher investment based on estimated potential revenues); And if the critics, reviewing maybe one in 100 books, like it and the review is published in a publicly visible place; And if the distribution system, down to major chains such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Borders and their equivalents outside the U.S., selling 95% by volume and taking ~5% by title of all books offered (mostly from 'name' writers and the major publishers), accepts and distributes the book; And if enough public word-of-mouth buzz creates decent sales numbers and long-term attention for you and your work; Then maybe you might have published a successful book. Maybe. I say again: maybe. Might. I repeat: might. Don't try to spend the money until the check has cleared. The odds of the above happening≈≈ all must, for success≈≈are hundreds of thousands to one against and may take years or decades. The odds are higher that lightning will strike you or that you will win the lottery, or more likely shrivel and die meantime of old age. Welcome to writing reality. Never forget the difference between amateurs and professionals, especially when it comes to writing: amateurs can perform brilliantly on occasion; professionals must deliver well, fast, consistently, no matter how they feel, or starve. Professional writing is merciless and deadlines or writers' blocks are relentless meat-grinders.

Publishers are under immense pressure to be profitable: many or perhaps most are now owned by conglomerates run by accountants focused on bottom-line profits, based on evaluations suitable in, say, the manufacturing or service industries. They cannot afford to staff with enough competent editors to read submissions from authors and consign all unsolicited material to 'slush piles.' Supply far outstrips demand. They are receiving enough from writers they are already publishing and rely on agents as gatekeepers. Much great writing dies on slush piles (an agent reportedly picked Billionaire J.K. Rowling's first Potter randomly from his slush pile). By contrast, dead authors such as Ludlum have 'new' books ghost written and earn millions from the grave. Brands sell regardless of quality. All Ludlum's book were reviewed at once, in TIME: "The Ludlum Formula."

Publishers know that only one in ten offerings will succeed, even from known sources, but don't know which one that might be. That's why agents can rarely get new writers accepted regardless of quality. A typical agency receives 500+ submissions per month (25+/day, but sometimes four or five times as many) and rejects >99.5%. An aspiring writer could query 250 agents (about the right number of the 2,500 listed in specific genres) and get perhaps one positive response≈≈but don't bet on it. My favorite, probably apocryphal tale in this area is about the chairman of a huge conglomerate who bought a New York publishing house.

"How many books did you publish last year?" he asked the CEO of the acquired publishing house.
"About 650," said the CEO.
"How many made money?"
"Oh, maybe 65."
"Well, next year you should publish 65≈≈the ones that make money." Brilliant.
The paradox: as Goldman explained, "no one knows anything." Many best-sellers were rejected dozens of times (Richard Bach's Seagull went to 30 publishers before Eleanor Friede at McMillan took it). Jerzy Kozinsky's Painted Bird was submitted as a test under another title soon after publication; Doris Lessing, probing the realities for unknowns, sent two of her best-sellers under other titles. Result: all were rejected, by form letter. This experiment has been repeated many times, with identical results, and reported widely in the Press. There were no follow-up accounts of writers' suicides in which the suicide note cited these awful realities.

Writing correctly is basic and essential, but for any of us but geniuses it takes a long time to learn. Experienced readers, starting with agents looking at queries, reject incompetents outright. Flawless spelling, grammar, syntax, vocabulary and style are vital to anyone trying to write professionally. It's akin to the need for job applicants to dress and behave properly for interviews≈≈inappropriate speech, manner and dress close interviews almost before they start. Cap on backwards? Bad idea.

Writing competence is obvious to a capable agent in the first few pages, or in the first paragraph. Note: this does not apply to best-seller junk from established 'authors' who are accepted regardless of literary skills≈≈one well-known and financially successful 'writer' of flash trash for a big house sends in her 'work' hand written in pencil on un-numbered legal-pad pages, leaving an editor to assemble the mess and turn it into a book. The 'writing' is barely readable, I might say. I do say.

[May 11, 2007] theShepler How to publish your book for a dozen friends

Paper is cumbersome to deal with when it is great quantities but many people still find it helpful (comforting?) to have documents printed on paper instead of reading them in electronic forms.

As you have noticed by now, I am involved with the NFSv4.1 effort and the resultant document which is currently at 464 pages. While a great majority of those NFS engineers interested in this document will opt for either a soft copy or the html formatted version there are those engineers that like to have a stack of paper to inspect.

Well, printing the 464 pages on your printer is likely a hassle; toss in getting the pagination correct or binding the result then it is a real pain. The audience for this type of technical document is very limited. The audience is limited even further given that the protocol is still evolving. How does one get something like this easily printed. Drop it off at Kinko's? Maybe. How do you share the result with your engineering buddies? Especially when they are spread around the world? Well, one example is cafepress.com (I am sure there are others but this is the one I bumped into first).

Create a simple account and resultant store, upload a PDF of your document in the page size that is preferable for your material, generate a little cover art and voila -- you have your own NFSv4.1 Draft 10 Book. Printed, bound, and shipped to your door. What a great deal!

In my particular case, I am not in it for the money. Just the convenience. The resultant price is the cost charged by cafepress.com and there is a nominal shipping fee. Very cool and helpful to the 12 or so NFSv4.1 friends that really care.

And yes, I chose the genre for the book very late at night with little patience for choosing something more appropriate.

Wikipedia founder remakes Web publishing economics Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

Monday December 11, 7:06 am ET

By Eric Auchard

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Free software is about to get freer.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said on Monday his for-profit company, Wikia Inc., is ready to give away -- for free -- all the software, computing, storage and network access that Web site builders need to create community collaboration sites.

Wikia, a commercial counterpart to the non-profit Wikipedia, will go even further to provide customers -- bloggers or other operators who meet its criteria for popular Web sites -- 100 percent of any advertising revenue from the sites they build.

Started two years ago, Wikia (http://www.wikia.com) aims to build on the anyone-can-edit success of the Wikipedia online encyclopedia. Using the same underlying software, called MediaWiki, Wikia hosts group publishing sites, known as wikis, on topics from Star Wars to psychology to travel to iPods.

"It is open-source software and open content," Wales said in a phone interview. "We will be providing the computer hosting for free, and the publisher can keep the advertising revenue."

That could prove disruptive to business models of Web sites that provide free services to customers but require a cut of any resulting revenue in return.

Wikia gives away the tools and the revenue to its users. It requires only that sites built with the company's resources link to Wikia.com, which makes money through advertising.

Wikia calls the free-hosting service "OpenServing" (http://www.openserving.com). It runs on an easy-to-use version of MediaWiki software developed by ArmchairGM.com, a sports fan community site Wikia recently acquired and plans to extend.

Wales is betting the plunging cost of computers and networks can help Wikia support the free services offer. "It is becoming more and more practical and feasible to do," he said.

WISDOM TO PREVAIL

"We don't have all the business model answers, but we are confident -- as we always have been -- that the wisdom of our community will prevail," he said.

The move follows the announcement last week that Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN - News) had become Wikia's first corporate investor and is acting as the sole investor in Wikia's second round of funding. Terms were not disclosed.

Wikia took $4 million in funding in March from Bessemer Venture Partners, Omidyar Network, high-profile Silicon Valley "angel" backers including Marc Andreessen, Dan Gillmor, Reid Hoffman and Mitch Kapor and Joichi Ito of Japan.

In recent months, Amazon.com has revealed an ambitious strategy of its own to offer a range of low-cost computer, data storage and Web site hosting services to companies large and small, which could come into play for Wikia.

Wales said using Amazon to supply Web services is not part of Wikia's deal with Amazon. "Potentially, but this is really completely separate," he said when asked if there was a tie.

Wikia aims to become is a clearinghouse of free software.

Armchair's software is the first of hundreds of freely licensed software packages to be hosted by the company in the near future, Wales said. These could include popular open-source publishing software such as WordPress and Drupal. Consumers would then have a single password across all sites.

"The real concept is to become much broader, to host lots of different free software and free content, Wales said.

Thirty-thousand users have posted 400,000 articles so far on Wikia sites. The San Mateo, California-based company employs 38 people, including top volunteer editors from the Wikipedia.

Warnings and Cautions for Writers--Print on Demand

What is Print on Demand?

Print on demand (POD) is the commonly-used term for the digital printing technology that allows a complete book to be printed and bound in a matter of minutes. This makes it easy and cost-effective to produce books one or two at a time or in small lots, rather than in larger print runs of several hundred or several thousand.

POD has a number of applications. Commercial and academic publishers use it to print advance reading copies, or when they can't justify the expense of producing and warehousing a sizeable print run--for instance, to keep backlist books available. Some independent publishers use it as a more economical fulfillment method, trading lower startup costs against smaller per-book profits (due to economies of scale, digitally printed books have a higher unit production cost than books produced in large runs on offset presses). Last but not least, there are the POD-based publishing service providers, which offer a for-fee service that can be described, depending on one's bias, as either vanity publishing or self-publishing.

The "POD Publisher" and the POD Stigma

Strictly speaking, "print on demand" is simply a term for a kind of printing technology, and doesn't describe any particular business model. Over the past few years, however, digital technology has become so firmly associated with a particular complex of business practices that the term "POD publisher" has taken on specific meaning.

What defines a POD publisher?

• Inadequate selectivity. Some POD publishers accept everyone who submits; others do more screening, but aren't expert enough to ensure high quality.
• Inadequate editing. Some POD publishers do no more than a light copy edit, releasing books that are essentially unedited. Others employ inexperienced or unprofessional editors, to more or less the same effect. Some POD publishers do no editing of any kind.
• High cover prices. As noted above, the unit cost for digitally printed books is higher than for books printed on offset presses. Cover prices, therefore, must be correspondingly higher in order for the publisher to make a profit. Depending on length, a POD book can cost more than twice as much as its offset counterpart.
• Short discounts. Booksellers expect discounts of 40% or more. POD publishers often offer much smaller discounts.
• Nonreturnability. Booksellers expect to be able to return unsold books to the publisher for full credit. POD publishers rarely accept returns, or if they do, have such a limited returns policy that it's hardly more attractive than no policy at all.
• Minimal marketing and distribution. POD publishers don't want to cut into their profits by spending money on book promotion. They'll ensure that their books are available for order online and through a wholesaler such as Ingram, but they won't advertise, and will make little or no effort to obtain professional reviews and bookstore placement.
• Other nonstandard practices. These may include amateurish formatting, terrible cover design, hellacious contracts, and fees of various kinds.

Most of these practices, including the fee, are characteristic of the POD-based publishing service providers discussed in the next section. However, they're increasingly common among POD-based independent publishers, whose often inexperienced staff may not have the skill to rigorously select and edit (never mind market and promote) their books, and whose shoestring budgets force them to keep costs as low as possible.

Not all POD-based independents employ these practices, of course. Unfortunately, a great many do. Together with the aggressive policies and poor-quality offerings of the POD-based publishing service providers, this has tainted print on demand in general. Many booksellers, reviewers, and readers are wary of POD on principle, and may assume that a publisher that relies exclusively or mainly on digital technology is a POD publisher, even if the publisher is entirely professional. This is the POD stigma, and it's something that anyone who's thinking of signing a contract with a POD-based independent publisher needs to take into account, because it can make marketing extremely difficult.

Slashdot Examining the Era of Print-on-Demand

IMHO Lulu is too expensive... I saw one book from lulu.com: it was overpriced and badly written.

You need to read deeper into the article. Different publishers are accepting source materials in different formats. Blurb has their composer on a web site, Picaboo gives you a free download of their software, and Lulu takes PDFs. Shop around, and find the one willing to work with you. They all seem comparably priced for the end product, which isn't much more than you'd pay for an ordinary hardbound edition from a well respected author.

Experience with Lulu.com

(Score:5, Informative)

by rdwald (831442) on Friday July 21, @04:44PM (#15759869)

I played around with Lulu.com's print-on-demand service a few months ago; it was surprisingly easy. I layed out the book in OpenOffice, saved it to a PDF, checked it in xpdf, and sent the file to them. A week or so later, I had a hard copy with a professional-looking cover and everything. One thing to note before ordering from them: Lulu's 6" x 9" format is actually larger than most paperback books; if you want yours to look "normal," don't use it. Anyway, overall it was a fairly positive experience; I'd recommend them for low-volume book printing.

• Re:Experience with Lulu.com

  (Score:3, Informative)

  by Fear the Clam (230933) on Friday July 21, @08:35PM (#15761081)

  The typical paperback (what's called a "mass market paperback" in the publishing biz ) is about 4.25 x 7 inches. The 6 x 9" size is called a "trade paperback."

• Re:Experience with Lulu.com

  (Score:3, Informative)

  by bcrowell (177657) on Friday July 21, @10:23PM (#15761406)
  (http://www.lightandmatter.com/)
   

  My experience with lulu has been a little more mixed. I have some free-information textbooks that I sell in print. (Even though they're free to download, sometimes it's nice to have a real printed, bound copy.)
  
  I had been buying them in batches of about 500 from a local guy, storing them in a closet, and selling them to schools and individuals.
  
  The problem was, it was just an incredibly inefficient way to do business. Recently, I've been experimenting with lulu. The good news is that they're incredibly efficient, and can produce a single book at about the same unit price as I'd been getting from a traditional printing process (or maybe just a little more).
  
  When I get an individual retail order, they take care of it. I've canceled my credit card processing account (which was a major pain to have). No more trips to the post office to mail books. Most importantly, I no longer have to keep ~$10,000 worth of inventory in a closet.

  There have been some problems, though:

  1. They sometimes do a lousy job of packaging books, and the books arrive damaged. If you complain, they're willing to send replacements, but only if you send them digital camera pictures to show the damage. It doesn't seem that reasonable to me to expect my customers to go through that kind of hassle for something that's basically due to lulu's sloppy packaging.
      
  2. A bigger problem has been that they don't do a very good job of supporting the pdf standard and OSS. Basically the situation seems to be that they have a number of subcontractors who actually produce the book, and which subcontractor it's sent to may depend on the geographical location of the customer. These subcontractors don't fully support the pdf standard. Part of the issue seems to be that some pdf documents take a lot of cpu time to print, so they put arbitrary, undocuments limits on various things. Also, there are things you can do with fonts (such as subsetting) that are allowed by the pdf standard, but that certain subcontractors may not allow. The machines (docutechs?) they use are totally proprietary. What it adds up to is that some of my books would print 10 or 100 times just fine, and then on one particular order I'd get a message passed back from the subcontractor saying that it failed to print. You can post on their forums about problems, and people there have been very helpful, but you actually can't get any information back from the subcontractor. Basically lulu says that if you use Acrobat to produce your pdf, and embed all fonts without subsetting, it will work, but if you use OSS to produce your pdf, it may or may not work. A little ironic, since IIRC the founder of lulu was one of the guys who started Red Hat. It's a little like web designers who only test their sites on IE; lulu only cares if their system works on Acrobat output.

• Jack Action (761544) on Friday July 21, @05:49PM (#15760294)
  (http://www.stupendoustales.com/)

  If you know how to use LaTex, you could set up a lulu.com book in about 10 minutes.
  
  LaTex has had a "book" template for years, and true to its purpose as "type-setting sofware" (created by Donald Knuth at Stanford), it creates an absolutely picture perfect document with chapter headings, and eye-pleasing margins and hyphenation. This is all done automatically according to the principles of typography printers have been using for hundreds of years (though of course they can be manually over-riden). All that is required is that you learn a few html-like mark-up commands to format your text.
  
  I've printed one novel with lulu.com and LaTex, and the inner text was easily as good as hard-cover books from the 50s and 60s (which I consider kind of a golden age of printing). The cover though does require some graphic design skill , as I think a professional designer noted above (though lulu.com does have a gallery of about 50 stock covers you can use).
  
  Also, lulu.com was started by Bob Young, founder of Red Hat Linux, because of the terrible experience he had publishing a book through conventional means. I believe lulu.com runs on FOSS software.

Technology Rewrites the Book - New York Times

When Steve Mandel, a management trainer from Santa Cruz, Calif., wants to show his friends why he stays up late to peer through a telescope, he pulls out a copy of his latest book, �Light in the Sky,� filled with pictures he has taken of distant nebulae, star clusters and galaxies.

Steve Mandel, above, created his book �Light in the Sky� using software from Blurb.com; the cover image is of the Hale-Bopp comet.

�I consistently get a very big �Wow!� The printing of my photos was spectacular � I did not really expect them to come out so well.� he said. �This is as good as any book in a bookstore.�

Mr. Mandel, 56, put his book together himself with free software from Blurb.com. The 119-page edition is printed on coated paper, bound with a linen fabric hard cover, and then wrapped with a dust jacket. Anyone who wants one can buy it for $37.95, and Blurb will make a copy just for that buyer.

The print-on-demand business is gradually moving toward the center of the marketplace. What began as a way for publishers to reduce their inventory and stop wasting paper is becoming a tool for anyone who needs a bound document. Short-run presses can turn out books economically in small quantities or singly, and new software simplifies the process of designing a book.

As the technology becomes simpler, the market is expanding beyond the earliest adopters, the aspiring authors. The first companies like AuthorHouse, Xlibris, iUniverse and others pushed themselves as new models of publishing, with an eye on shaking up the dusty book business. They aimed at authors looking for someone to edit a manuscript, lay out the book and bring it to market.

The newer ventures also produce bound books, but they do not offer the same hand-holding or the same drive for the best-seller list. Blurb�s product will appeal to people searching for a publisher, but its business is aimed at anyone who needs a professional-looking book, from architects with plans to present to clients, to travelers looking to immortalize a trip.

Blurb.com�s design software, which is still in beta testing, comes with a number of templates for different genres like cookbooks, photo collections and poetry books. Once one is chosen, it automatically lays out the page and lets the designer fill in the photographs and text by cutting and pasting. If the designer wants to tweak some details of the template � say, the position of a page number or a background color � the changes affect all the pages.

The software is markedly easier to use � although less capable � than InDesign from Adobe or Quark XPress, professional publishing packages that cost around $700. It is also free because Blurb expects to make money from printing the book. Prices start at $29.95 for books of 1 to 40 pages and rise to $79.95 for books of 301 to 440 pages.

Blurb, based in San Francisco, has many plans for expanding its software. Eileen Gittins, the chief executive, said the company would push new tools for �bookifying� data, beginning with a tool that �slurps� the entries from a blog and places them into the appropriate templates.

The potential market for these books is attracting a number of start-ups and established companies, most of them focusing on producing bound photo albums. Online photo processing sites like Kodak Gallery (formerly Ofoto), Snapfish and Shutterfly and popular packages like the iPhoto software from Apple let their customers order bound volumes of their prints.

These companies offer a wide variety of binding fabrics, papers, templates and background images, although the styles are dominated by pink and blue pastels. Snapfish offers wire-bound �flipbooks� that begin at $4.99. Kodak Gallery offers a �Legacy Photo Book� made with heavier paper and bound in either linen or leather. It starts at $69.99. Apple makes a tiny 2.6-by-3.5-inch softbound book that costs $3.99 for 20 pages and 29 cents for each additional page.

The nature and style of these options are changing as customers develop new applications. �Most of the people who use our products are moms with kids,� says Kevin McCurdy, a co-founder of Picaboo.com in Palo Alto, Calif. But he said there had been hundreds of applications the company never anticipated: teachers who make a yearbook for their class, people who want to commemorate a party and businesses that just want a high-end brochure or catalog.

Picaboo, like Blurb, distributes a free copy of its book design software, which runs on the user�s computer. Mr. McCurdy said that running the software on the user�s machine saves users the time and trouble of uploading pictures. The companies that offer Web-based design packages, however, point out that their systems do not require installing any software and also offer a backup for the user�s photos.

As more companies enter the market, they are searching for niches. One small shop in Duvall, Wash., called SharedInk.com, emphasizes its traditional production techniques and the quality of its product. Chris Hickman, the founder, said that each of his books was printed and stitched together by �two bookbinders who�ve been in the industry for 30 or 40 years.� The result, he said, is a higher level of quality that appeals to professional photographers and others willing to pay a bit more. Books of 20 pages start at $39.95.

Some companies continue to produce black-and-white books. Lulu.com is a combination printer and order-fulfillment house that prints both color and black-and-white books, takes orders for them and places them with bookstores like Amazon.com.

Lulu works from a PDF file, an approach that forces users to rely on basic word processors or professional design packages. If this is too complex, Lulu offers a marketplace where book designers offer their services. Lulu does offer a special cover design package that will create a book�s cover from an image and handle the specialized calculations that compute the size of the spine from the number of pages and the weight of the paper.

A 6-by-9-inch softcover book with 150 black-and-white pages from Lulu would cost $7.53 per single copy.

These packages are adding features that stretch the concept of a book, in some cases undermining the permanent, fixed nature that has been part of a book�s appeal. The software from SharedInk.com, for instance, lets a user leave out pages from some versions of the book. If Chris does not like Pat, for instance, then the copy going to Chris could be missing the pages with Pat�s pictures.

Blurb is expanding its software to let a community build a book. Soon, it plans to introduce a tool that would allow group projects, like a Junior League recipe book, to be created through Blurb�s Web site. The project leader would send out an e-mail message inviting people to visit the site and add their contributions to customized templates, which would then be converted into book pages.

�Books are breaking wide open,� Ms. Gittins said. �Books are becoming vehicles that aren�t static things.�

The Coming Ecology of Ebook Publishing

In a recent Salon story on ebooks, I was struck by the following comment:

Fatbrain.com contends that Simon & Schuster's decision not to let Fatbrain.com join other online retailers like Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com in selling King's book was a way of punishing Fatbrain.com for presuming to poach on the venerable publisher's territory.

Here's what this story led me to say to Fatbrain CEO Chris McAskill:

S&S is right, though. Fatbrain put a stake in the ground, and started acting like a publisher rather than a reseller. As I've argued repeatedly on the StudioB mailing list, it's tough to be both a publisher and a retailer, because you end up with the worst of both rather than the best of both. Not only do publishers rightly see you asa competitor, but authors see you as a publisher who has only one outlet: your own web presence. So unless you get dominant share REALLY quickly, you're out of the game, because faced with a publisher with single-point distribution, or a publisher with multi-layer distribution, the multi-point, multi-layer publisher will appear to have significantly more reach.

Later on in the Salon story, this point is driven home:

[David] Gernert [John Grisham's agent] says that electronic publishers have approached Grisham, but none has succeeded in persuading him to go digital, partly because the needs of author and e-publisher don't, as Gernert sees it, entirely coincide. "For an electronic publisher to say that they're publishing Grisham is instant legitimacy and instant publicity and instant viability," he says. "As an author you would want a story to go on as many computers, Web sites and devices as possible."

Until we have a system where "publishing" is distinct from "distribution" and from "retailing", and "publishing" means being an intermediary between authors and a complex, multi-point distribution system, we won't have a market that is ready for prime time. (The nature of that publishing intermediary includes shielding retailers (and ultimately consumers) from the slush pile, and shielding authors from building relationships with thousands of resellers.)

It's OK to have a publishing arm, I think, but not OK to munge publishing and retailing together. It's OK for a retailer to publish some of its own books, but not to compete with publishers for original content by offering royalty levels that ignore what publishers bring to the table. It's OK for a publisher to have some direct sales, as long as they don't cut out their resellers by offering preferred pricing to direct customers.

Fatbrain has made some good progress by separating mightywords.com from fatbrain.com. That makes mightywords your publishing arm. Now, maybe you can find a way to get fatbrain.com back into the ebook retailing/distribution space, where I predict all your competitors will soon be, using a format that reproduces many of the characteristics of print publishing:

1. The author/publisher can produce the work once, and have it resold by many parties.
2. Distributors will allow authors/publishers to reach specialty retailers, so that every retailer can participate without the overhead of one-to-one relationships with every publisher.
3. Specialty distributors/retailers/publishers may make the work available in alternate versions.
4. Third parties will catalog and review the various published works.
5. To support the needs of libraries, companies like Netlibrary will make works available for "check out" rather than purchase.

There are a couple of other points I'd make, partly coming off #3 above:

There will likely be two or three branches of the online book tree.

3a. There is likely to be a format that is targeted for download, either to the PC or to a small device. The format that ultimately succeeds may well need to be easily transferable from one to the other.

3b. There is likely to be a format that is targeted for online/connected access, which benefits (e.g. in the tech book space) from integrated online searching across a library of titles, supports other ancillary materials from the web space, and so on. This kind of thing might be hosted by a publisher, by a corporate intranet, by a library, or by some new class of information reseller/integrator.

3c. The solution to prevail will include print-on-demand (and/or the bundled sale of print and online copies. In fact, the ideal Digital Rights Management solution would support the aggregation of a, b, and c, such that someone could buy a copy for download (which would take advantage of the ability to buy the product from a variety of retailers), but present some sort of credential representing that purchase to a central site (hosted either by a publisher or a third party) so that it can get access to that book in the context of other services provided by that aggregator. Such DRM solution would allowed tiered pricing (either up or down) for the purchase of added services (such as print on demand) or for some kind of repeat purchaser discounting.

In any event, it will be interesting to see how it all plays out. The one thing I'm sure of is that we'll see a repeat of what we saw in the web space, where everyone started out thinking "disintermediation" but things didn't take off till we had reintermediation, with the development of a rich ecology of sites and services cooperating to make a fully functioning marketplace.

In the early days of the web (1993), when we had created GNN, the first web portal and the first web site supported by advertising, we had a huge uphill struggle, because we had to do everything ourselves. We had to get people on the web in the first place (equivalent to getting them to download some kind of ebookreader, but even harder); we had to convince advertisers that there was a market there (we commissioned the first ever market research study on Internet demographics); we had to evangelize the possibilities and experiment with different formats. The list goes on and on.

I contrasted this with my experience as a print publisher, where we fit neatly into an ecology, with manufacturers who already knew how to make our product, retailers and wholesalers who came to sign us up, natural places to advertise and create demand, known standards for pricing, customer expectations of what a book looked like, etc. etc.

I ended up going around giving talks saying that the web wasn't going to take off till it looked more like print publishing. When I was explaining this to Ted Leonsis of AOL, he "got it" with the memorable line: "You're saying 'Where's the Publisher's Clearinghouse for the Web?'" Exactly. There are all these crazy intermediaries who make any branch of print publishing work, from rack jobbers to remainder houses, to folks who've figured out how to make school children into a sales force :-(

Now, on the web, we're seeing the success grow in proportion to the richness of that cooperating ecology:

• ISPs and hosting services
• self-published sites (authors)
• online "magazines" (publishers) like Salon
• portals
• search engines
• ad agencies
• ad hosting services
• caching services
• web design firms
• market researchers to justify the ad pricing

So the challenge I put out to all would-be ebook publishers is to envision a future in which they aren't the only party who succeeds. The market won't take off till it's a win for many parties.

This isn't to say that there won't be massive realignments of power and success in the new market (you only have to look at how much market share amazon.com took from traditional booksellers to know that.) There will be new publishers, new retailers, new wholesalers, and new "manufacturers" (software platform providers) springing up, as well as new providers of various support services. But my suspicion is that anyone who tries to go it alone will be left behind by folks who figure out what niche in the ecology they want to own, and pursue it wholeheartedly.

Tim O'Reilly is founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., and an activist for Internet standards and for open source software. For everything Tim, see tim.oreilly.com.

What do you think about self-published books by Tim O'Reilly

Apr 15, 2005

At 37Signals, Jason Fried asks: "What do you think about self-published books?" There's a lot of great reader feedback. I wrote some comments myself, recounting my start as a self-published author to becoming one of the largest computer book publishers in the country. (My first print run was 100 copies. In the twenty years since, I've sold more than 30 million copies of a thousand odd titles.)

Anyway, to make a long story short, several people suggested I repeat my comments here. Here goes:

Well, I like to think of myself as a self publisher who grew up into a real publisher. So I�ve seen the world from both sides. I never thought when I printed my first run of 100 copies of Learning the Unix Operating System in 1985 that it would go on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, and start me on the path to being one of the largest computer book publishers in the country. It�s been a long and fruitful ride, which took me in many unexpected directions, and with a huge number of mistakes, some of which turned out to be inspired!

Here are the differences between self publishing and working with an established publisher as I see them:

1) If you�re not an experienced author, having a good editor can help you produce a book you�ll be proud of. You guys have already written a book, so you know what help you got, and whether or not it improved your book. So scratch that issue.

2) If you�re not well known, you may have real trouble getting visibility and distribution for your book. You guys are well known and have a built-in distribution channel and audience. Get your book on Amazon, plus sell it from your own site, and you�ll probably move as many copies as most publishers would move of a comparable book from less well known authors. (Given your current notoriety, you might even be able to sell as many copies as New Riders sold of your Defensive Design book, or more.) My guess is that I could significantly more copies of your book via additional channels than you would sell yourself, but probably not enough to make up the difference in margin that you�d make by printing and selling the book yourselves. So scratch that issue as well.

3) If you sell a lot of books, you�ll find yourself having to build a lot of the apparatus of a publisher. When we were small, we hired a temp to ship out books, and when a shipment arrived from the printer, all our employees would make a bucket brigade to carry the cartons to the basement. But that gets old fast. This is the biggest question for you: what business do you want to be in? A successful publisher (self or otherwise) ends up in the business of book design, copyediting and layout, printing (contracted out, but still a set of relationships and processes you need to manage), warehousing, shipping, order taking (can mostly be done self service), customer service (�where�s my book?�; �my copy was damaged in shipping�, etc.), and many other mundane but necessary tasks.

And of course, once you have more than a couple of books, you really need to start expanding your channels, your retail marketing (very challenging to get a foot in the door in today�s market), and your sales force. So you start up the ramp, as I did, of becoming a full fledged publisher yourself.

Of course, there are alternatives to doing all the work. For example, you could become what�s called a packager, where you establish a series and and brand, and deliver camera ready copy to a publisher, who pays you a higher than normal royalty because they provide no editing or development services, but still takes the inventory risk, and thereafter treats the book as one of their own products. Pogue Press (now wholly owned by O�Reilly) and Deke Press are two O�Reilly imprints that started out as packaging deals. To make something like this work, you need to have a strong brand (you do), a scalable publishing idea (rather than just a single book), and the ability to deliver completed books to the publisher.

The next step up is to publishing itself, which adds the element of inventory risk. That is, it�s easy to say, �Wow, print a book for $2, sell it for $30, pocket $28.� But what happens instead is �print 1000 copies of a book for $5 each, 5000 copies for $3 each, or 10,000 copies for $2 each.� And then if you sell fewer than you expect, you might end up with a very different cost of goods than you expect. Many small publishers make the mistake of printing too many copies, and their cost of goods (and warehousing those goods) becomes much higher than they expect. So you might print 10,000 for $20,000, sell 1000 directly from your website for $30, and another 1000 from Amazon for $14 (which is about what you�ll get after discount), you�re netting $44,000 on a $20,000 investment, not the $300,000 that the naive math of $2 manufacturing vs. $30 list price would suggest. Still, not bad, and a real option � if you want to be in the publishing business for the long haul. Self publishing a single book can be fun. But I�d be that after the second or third, you either decide to be in the publishing business full bore, or look for a partner to take on some of the chores.

FWIW, many small publishers are distributed by larger publishers. When O�Reilly was small, for example, Addison-Wesley and later Thomson did our international distribution before we started our own international companies. And today, O�Reilly distributes smaller presses like the Pragmatic Programmers, No Starch, Paraglyph, Sitepoint, and Syngress. That leverages our sales force, our distribution systems, and our relationships with major retailers.

Note however, that in order to take either the packaging or distribution route, you really need to be thinking about more than a single book.

Tim O'Reilly is founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., and an activist for Internet standards and for open source software. For everything Tim, see tim.oreilly.com.

Beta Books RULE! Authors, please do this more often!

What the Pragmatic Programmers did with their new book on Rails is wonderful: they started selling it as a PDF when still in BETA - to please the eager, and get feedback/typos.

Now that I'm going through the book, this appeals to me on a few different levels:

#1 - I had a strong practical need for this book NOW - not in 5 months, but now now now. THANK YOU to the authors for making this available early. It has helped me immensely.

#2 - They have a wonderful error-submitting page that they respond to daily. I found a few typos as I was going through the examples, submitted them, and got a reply that they were fixed the following day. THIS IS BRILLIANT! Why wait until it's on the bookshelves to find out that there are typos?

#3 - I prefer technical books on PDF anyway.

Releasing books in beta-format takes advantage of the fact that there are different kinds of readers. Some, like me, need the info sooner, even if it's not "perfect" yet. We're avid fans of the technology. We'll hear on the mailing list that you are making this available. We'll be right there giving feedback daily, which will improve the book for when it's released to the much-larger public.

I hope more authors and publishers do this.

Derek Sivers is the founder, president, and sole programmer behind CD Baby, independent music distribution, and HostBaby, web hosting for musicians.

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Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

• Here's another one
  2005-07-13 08:00:15  alexfarran [Reply | View]
  
  Peter Seibel's book, Practical Common Lisp, is available on his web site http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ and was discussed on the comp.lang.lisp newsgroup as he wrote it. Didn't seem to hurt the sales at all.

• Re:
  2005-07-13 03:12:00  aristotle [Reply | View]
  
  Interesting. In essence, this takes the principle of wiki, in a restricted form, to the book authoring process. The strenghts (and weaknesses) of wikis are well-known.

Better writing skills for business, thesis, creative, and technical writing

Virtualbookworm.com Publishing Inc.

The Culture of the Internet and Usenet

UpsideToday Ebiz

Write a book and Xlibris will (for free) format the file, design a cover, and tag it with an ISBN number --which means book sellers can track the title. The book gets posted on the website and sells for an average of $16. Extra service fees for design range from $300 to $1,200 per book. If someone orders a copy, Lightning Source prints and ships the title, and Xlibris and the author split the profit, typically about $3.

Xlibris - Where writers become authors.

The company charges writers $459 for formatting, posting and publicizing books, including arranging author appearances and posting audio books that can be downloaded from the Net. Audio books are the fastest-growing part of the publishing industry, a $2 billion annual market, according to the Audio Publishers Association.

"I don't have a publishing background," McCormack says, "which is great because it makes me think anything is possible."

Xlibris Bookstore

1stBooks Library...Where getting published is easier than you think! -- looks like more expensive that Xlibris

ZDNet eWEEK Boom time for online books By Grant Du Bois

Boom time for online books?

September 1, 2000 eWEEK

Author Stephen King's recent foray into e-book publishing has kicked off a new round of activity among book publishers and software developers looking to gain a foothold in the nascent market.

Since last year, well-known book publishers such as Houghton Mifflin Co., The McGraw-Hill Cos. and Simon & Schuster Inc. have hooked up with software companies to convert books into digital format and enable them to be read on screen.

Now Adobe Systems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are duking it out in the market for e-book reading software.

This week at the Seybold Seminars conference here, Adobe announced that it has acquired Glassbook Inc., a provider of e-book software that last week announced a beta version of its Reader 2.0 software. Terms of the deal were not released.

Features of Reader 2.0, due to ship in mid-September, include two-page views, text-to-speech capabilities, screen rotation, text annotation and highlighting with electronic sticky notes, searching and text enhancement to make content easier to read, said officials from Glassbook, of Waltham, Mass.

Adobe, of San Jose, Calif., also announced an expanded partnership with digital content services company iUniverse.com to offer authors and publishers a faster and less expensive way to publish, manage and distribute their content as e-books.

Separately at the show, Microsoft announced a partnership with online retailer Amazon.com to create a customized version of the Microsoft Reader e-book software. The new version will enable consumers to purchase and download e-book titles directly from Amazon.com. Microsoft Reader will be the preferred format for Amazon.com's future e-book store.

Microsoft and Adobe have similar relationships with Barnes&Noble.com.

Microsoft, of Redmond, Wash., also selected ContentGuard Inc., a provider of digital rights management software for content, to help booksellers, publishers and consumers easily adopt the digital format. ContentGuard will support Microsoft customers who want to build distribution systems using Microsoft's Digital Asset Server in order to launch digital offerings.

Adobe already has a similar relationship with ContentGuard.

ContentGuard's eBook Practice, announced this week, provides content preparation and management services to online bookstores and publishers so they can create digital offerings. The eBook Practice also provides an outsourced operation to manage the entire eBook distribution process and a consulting service to install and manage in-house e-book operations, said officials of the McLean, Va., company.

The stakes in the race to create standard e-book software are not small.

"If you get to be the provider of software for reading, essentially you get to be the toll keeper," said Jonathan Gaw, Internet research manager at International Data Corp. in Mountain View, Calif. "For every book or magazine article that uses this software, then you get to charge a toll, and if it's 5 or 10 cents per article, that adds up quickly. The question is, who will develop the best and most widely accepted standard?"

Boston-based Houghton Mifflin is working with several of the reading software vendors, including a pending agreement with Microsoft in the next few months, to reach more consumers and cover the different ways -- PC, laptop, personal digital assistant -- they want to receive e-books.

"We're working to do this as intelligently as we can," said David Jost, vice president of electronic publishing in the company's trade and reference division. "Every e-book company has their own reading or e-book format. We have to check each company's [digital] version of the book to make it consistent with our [print] version."

McGraw-Hill is also embracing the technology in this evolving market. It plans to have a total of 700 e-books on its list by the end of September, and 250 of them will be sold through the company's new online store.

"We're providing our customers with books in as many [digital] formats as possible," said April Hattori, a spokeswoman for McGraw-Hill in New York. "We want to be able to give our customers a choice. It's important to be in as many places as possible."

Although both Jost and Hattori believe publishing e-books will lower costs in the long run, they said it's too early to predict how much. While e-books will cut down on unused hard copy inventory, publishers will still have to pay software programmers to convert books into the proper electronic format, Jost said.

According to Billy Pidgeon, a Web technologies analyst at Jupiter Communications Inc. in New York, the market for e-books is in its infancy. "It's really early. Dedicated hardware is very iffy. ... Audio books as digital files with an MP3 player is a more immediate market."

Publishers have to develop consumer awareness for e-books, and vendors have to drive consumer adoption, Pidgeon said, noting that book printers are working with publishers to support common standards for text such as Microsoft Word and Adobe PDF.

"To a large extent the publishing industry is still in the Guttenberg era, and it's being dragged into the digital era," he said. "It's going to be a rough ride for some of these publishers. Fortunately, the market is still young, so there will be some time. But for publishers not looking at this space, they may be losing an opportunity."

[Mar 03, 2000]  How do I publish my eMatter

Jacqui Bennett Writers Bureau For Writers Writing

[Sept 20, 1999] Slashdot Interviews Interview Tim O'Reilly Answers

Dominican asks:
How often are books revised? Open to the author?

Tim responds:
In our early days, we revised our books constantly. For example, I did ten editions of Managing UUCP and Usenet between 1986 and 1991--about one every six months. The book grew in something much like an open source software process, where I was constantly incorporating reader feedback, and rolling it into the next printing. We didn't do a big marketing push about it being a new edition, we just had a change log on the copyright page, much like you do with a piece of software, each time you check it in and out of your source code control system.

Now that we're much larger (and many of our authors no longer work directly for us), it's harder to do that, but we still roll in a lot of small changes each time we go back to print.

The reason why it's harder mainly has to do with the inefficiency of retail distribution. When there are thousands of copies sitting in bookstores waiting to be bought, rolling out a "new edition" is a big deal, since you have to take back and recycle all the old ones. So you have to go through a process of letting the inventory "stored in the channel" thin out. This means that, especially for a very successful book, you can't do updates as often as you otherwise might like. We slipstream in fixes to errors and other small changes, but major changes need to be characterized as a "new edition" with all the attendant hoopla.

There is also the issue you advert to in your question, and that is the availability of the author to do the 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 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:
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. 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. We're hoping to do the same thing in publishing Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar (and other essays) this fall. Most of you guys have probably read them online, but there is a larger population who've probably heard the buzz, and will pick them up in the bookstore. On the other hand, an author who puts a lousy book online will only show this to the world, and sales will be 10% of what they'd been if the reader hadn't been able to see the book first.

Perhaps more compelling is the evidence from the Java world, where sales of the Addison-Wesley books based on the Sun documentation (which is mostly available online) are quite dismal, while our unique standalone books (as those from other publishers) do quite well. More importantly, though, programmers in our focus groups for Java report spending far less overall on books than programmers in other areas, because they say that they get most of the info they need online.

All of this is what tells me we need to tread carefully in this area, since I have to look out for the interests of my employees and my authors as well as my customers. In the end, free books online may look like a great deal, but it won't look so good if it ends up disincetivizing authors from doing work that you guys need.

And frankly, we have conversations all the time that go like this: "I'm making $xxx as a consultant. I'd love to write a book, but it's really not worth my while." At O'Reilly, we try to use authors who really know their stuff. So writing a book is either a labor of love, or it's a competitive situation with all the other things that author could be doing with their time. So money is an issue.

maelstrom asks:
(two out of three submitted) What books would you recommend a budding writer should read and study? and Do you read every book you publish?

Tim responds:
Books about writing that I like are Strunk & White (The Elements of Style) and William Zinsser's On Writing Well. But really, read any books that you like. Reading good technical books, and thinking about what works about them for you, is always great. We learn far more by osmosis than by formal instruction. So read, and then write.

Going back to the recurrent questions about free documentation--a great way to learn to write is to do it. Contribute your efforts to one of the many open source software projects as a documentation writer, get criticism from the user community, and learn by doing.

I would say that the ability to organize your thoughts clearly is the most important skill for a technical writer. Putting things in the right order, and not leaving anything out (or rather, not leaving out anything important, but everything unimportant), is far more important than trying to write deathless prose. The best writing is invisible, not showy. My favorite quote about writing (which came from a magazine interview that I read many years ago) was from Edwin Schlossberg: "The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think."

As to your second question: alas, I no longer have time to read everything we publish. We have a number of senior editors whose work I trust completely -- I never read their stuff unless I'm trying to use it myself. For new or more junior editors, I generally do a bit of a "sample" of each book somewhere during the development process. If I like it, I say so, and don't feel I have to look at it again. If I don't like it, I may make terrible trouble, as some of my editors and authors can attest.

howardjp asks:
One of the biggest compaints aong critics of the BSD operating systems is the lack of available books. Since O'Reilly is the leader in Open Source documentation, you are well positioned to enter the BSD market. With that in mind, why hasn't O'Reilly published any BSD books in recent memory?

Tim responds:
Every once in a while we make a stupid editorial decision, as, for instance, when we turned down Greg Lehey's proposed BSD book (now published by Walnut Creek CDROM). This was based on the fact that the BSD documentation, which we'd co-published with Usenix, had done really poorly, and the relative sales of our original BSD UNIX in a Nutshell relative to our System V/Solaris one. That was many years ago now, and BSD has emerged from the shadows of the AT&T lawsuit, and become a real force in the open source community. So I definitely think that there are some books that we might want to do there. Proposals are welcome.

That being said, so many of our books cover BSD (just like they cover Linux, even if they don't say Linux on the cover). After all, BSD is one of the great mothers of the open source movement. What is Bind, what is sendmail, what is vi, what is a lot of the TCP/IP utility suite but the gift of BSD...it's so much part of the air we all breathe that it doesn't always stand out as topic that gets the separate name on it.

chromatic asks:
Would you ever consider making previous editions of certain books free for download when supplanted by newer editions?

For example, when Larry Wall finally gets around to writing the 3rd edition of the Camel (probably about the same time as Perl 6), would you consider making the second edition available in electronic format?

I realize this has the possibility of forking documentation, but it's hard to find anyone more qualified than Larry, Randal, and Tom, for example. It would only work for certain books.

Tim responds:
The previous edition of CGI Programming for the WWW is available online now, while we work on a new edition, as is MH & xmh and Open Sources. You can read these at http://www.oreilly.com/openbooks/. We'd like to put more of our out of print books online, but it's a matter of man hours. Our Web team is organizing a new effort around this now, so look for more books to appear on this page.

And in fact, an awful lot of Programming Perl *is* available for free online, as part of the Perl man page or other perl documentation. It's not available in exactly the same form, but it's available. That's one of the big questions for online documentation: does the online version always look like the print version.

But this is a good question, and it's one we have certainly something we can think about. Might be another interesting experiment in understanding the ecology of online publishing.

Crutcher asks:
Not sure how to phrase this, but, well, what is the status of O'Reilley and marketing books to schools and colleges for use as textbooks. Our textbooks suck, and if there textbook versions of ya'lls books it would rock.

Tim responds:
We actually do quite a bit of marketing to schools and colleges, and they are used as textbooks in a number of places. If you know of a professor who ought to be adopting an O'Reilly book, please send mail to our manager of college and library sales, Kerri Bonasch, at [email protected]. We also have a Web site to support this effort at http://www.oreilly.com/sales/edu/.

Are there any specific things that you see as obstacles to use of the books as textbooks? What topics would you especially like to see as textbooks?

zilym asks:
Are there any plans to improve the binding on your future books? Many of us use O'Reilly books to death and the binding is the first to go. I know I certainly wouldn't mind pay slightly more for a stronger version of some of the most heavily used titles.

Tim responds:
Hmmm. We use a special high-cost binding, which allows the books to lay flat. It's quite a bit more expensive than the normal perfect binding used by most publishers, and we think it's worth it. I have heard lots of compliments on how great this binding is. I haven't heard complaints about it breaking down--at least not without use that would break down a normal perfect-bound book as well. I don't know of any way to make it more durable.

Maybe hardcover? It would be great to have a slashdot poll on how many people share your problem and would like to see O'Reilly books in hardcover. (One caveat: We tried an experiment once (for our Phigs Programming Manuals--real behemoths) to offer books in both hardcover and softcover, so people could choose. Despite polls that said people would pay more for a more durable hardcover, everyone bought the softcover to save the difference in price.) So, if there is a poll, how much would you pay for a more durable book?

jzawodn asks:
Given some of the recent discussion surrounding the Linux Documentation Project (LDP), I began to wonder about its long-term direction and viability.

I "grew up" with Linux by reading *many* of the HOWTOs and other documents that were part of the LDP. In many ways, I'd have been lost without the LDP. But with the growth of Linux mind-share and increased demand for texts that help newcomers get acquainted with the various aspects of running their own Linux systems, there seems to have been a stagnation in much of the free documentation. I can't help but to wonder if many of the folks who would be working on LDP-type material have opted to write books for publishers instead.

Where do you see free documentation projects like the LDP going? What advice can you offer to the LDP and those who write documents for inclusion in the project? Might we see electronic versions of O'Reilly books (or parts of them) included in free documentation projects?

Tim responds:
I don't think that the slowdown of the LDP is because of authors deserting it to write commercial books. In fact, I think you're going to see a reinvigoration of free documentation efforts, as publishers try to contribute to these projects. I think that the right answer is for those who are writing books to figure out some useful subset of their work that will be distributed online as part of the free documentation, and for there to be some added value only available in books. I think that this has worked pretty well for the core perl documentation, where an update to the camel and an update to the online docs are really seen as part of the same project.

When O'Reilly is directly involved in an Open Source project, this is fairly typical of what we do. For example, O'Reilly was one of the original drivers behind the development of the docbook DTD, which is now used by the LDP. (We started the Davenport Group, which developed Docbook, back in the late 80's.)

We're releasing a book about Docbook, by Norm Walsh and Len Muellner, called DocBook: the Definitive Guide." It will be out in October. Norm and Len's book will be also available for free online through the Oasis web site as the official documentation of the DocBook DTD. This is our contribution to users of DocBook; without our signing and creating this book, good documentation for DocBook wouldn't exist. (This is in addition to our historical support of the creation of DocBook.)

Our goal here, though, is evangelical. We want more people to use docbook (and xml in general), and we think that making the documentation free will help that goal.

CmdrTaco asks (on behalf of a friend):
I understand from a very reliable source that O'Reilly is moving their website from a single Sun and an inside developed webserver to an NT cluster and some barely functioning proprietary software. Their bread and butter has been Unix. They have been taking a more and more vocal position within the OSS community. Why are they switching to NT?

Tim responds:
Well, your very reliable source has only part of the story right, and that's because it's a long and involved story. It started about 18 months ago, when the people on our web team wanted to replace what had become a fairly obsolete setup whose original developers no longer work for the company.

This system--which was about five years old--involves a lot of convoluted perl scripts that take data in a pseudo-sgml format, and generate a bunch of internal documents (marketing reports, sales sheets, copy for catalogs etc) as well as web pages. We wanted to do something more up to date, and didn't have internal resources to devote to a complete rework.

So we went out to a number of web design firms for bids. The winning firm does work on both NT and UNIX, but they showed us all kinds of nifty things that they said they had already developed on NT that we could use. These were tools for surveys, content management, etc. There was also stuff around integration with the spreadsheets and databases and reports used by our financial and customer service people. To recreate these tools on their UNIX side would cost several hundred thousand dollars.

So I said: "We can either walk the talk, or talk the walk. I don't care which, as long as what we do and what we say line up. If you can do it better and cheaper on NT, go ahead and do it, and I'll go out there and tell the world why the NT solution was better."

I was prepared to have to tell a story about interoperability--after all, despite all our efforts to champion open source, we realize that our customers use many, many different technologies, and we try to use them all ourselves as well. We were looking at doing some things on NT--the stuff our vendor said they already had working--while incorporating other elements on UNIX, Mac, Linux, and Pick (yes, we run a Pick system too!). The whole thing was going to be a demonstration of ways that you can choose from and integrate tools from many different platforms.

Instead, I have to tell the story that is so familiar to Slashdot readers, of promises of easy-to-use tools that, unfortunately, don't work as advertised. As your source suggests, the NT parts of the system haven't been delivered on time or on budget, and what we've seen doesn't appear to work, and we're considering scrapping that project and going back to the safe choice. To put a new spin on an old saw: No one ever got fired for using open source.

I say that tongue-in-cheek of course, because unlike a lot of open source partisans, I don't think that all good things come from the open source community. We like to bash Microsoft with the idea that "no matter how big you are, all the smart people don't work for you" but it's just as true that they don't all work for the open source community either. There are great ideas coming from companies like Sun and Microsoft, and (most of) the people who work there are just like us. They care about doing a good job. They want to solve interesting problems and make the world a better place. And sometimes they do.

I consider it my job to give them a fair shake at convincing me, and if they do, to give you a fair shake at learning what they've done right as well as what they've done wrong. I'll keep you posted.

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4 better deals (best first)

• **** Virtualbookworm  They screen manuscripts, have a great customer support, a very moderate setup fee, good distribution, and a fair contract, the only problem is that their author's discount is a little low.
• This is the only publisher that actually met all of the criteria outlined in the "What to look for" section of the Is POD for me? guide.
• Llumina Press Their setup fee is a little expensive (as it relates to their royalties, they are affordable otherwise), but they screen manuscripts, they have good distribution and graphics are not a problem (though they recently became an extra).
• They don't screen manuscripts, don't offer a choice when it comes to trim size, authors have little control over a couple of aspects and readers can't buy the books directly from the publisher's site, but they are reasonably priced, they offer great royalties, you can buy copies of your own book paying little more than printing costs, they have good distribution and their books seem to have a competitive retail price.
•  PageFree A publisher that doesn't screen manuscripts but gives authors a great deal of control over the whole project and has a lot of flexibility when it comes to format. The main problems have to do with a couple of grey areas in their contract and a basic package that may be a little too bare bones for some authors' needs.

Articles

• sfwa.org
• Julie Duffy, former Director of Author Services at fee-based POD Xlibris, offers a series of print-on-demand articles that provide a good overview of the POD process, from the technology itself to sales and contract concerns. There's some very useful information here about the technical issues you need to consider if you're thinking of using a POD service.
• Morris Rosenthal of Foner Books offers another comprehensive POD self-publisher's primer.
• Printondemand.com is a "digital printer's resource," offering news and information on digital technology. Among other things, it allows you to search for a digital printing service provider in your area.
• Publishing in the Future: The Potential and Reality of POD, by editor Sean Wallace of Prime Books, offers an excellent discussion of a variety of issues associated with POD-based independent publishing.
• From Aeonix Publishing Group: a concise discussion of the issues that factor into an independent publisher's decision whether or not to use digital technology to produce its books.
• Supply and (Print on) Demand, an article by Jaclyn Pare for Poets & Writers, provides a good, if dated, overview of both the hope and the hype surrounding the POD services, and discusses the marketing challenges that POD-published writers face.
• Clea Saal's Books and Tales website provides comparisons of a number of POD services, as well as a series of articles on the stages of the POD publication process (note: Writer Beware has received complaints about several of the publishers listed here, including publishers that this site rates highly).
• Dehanna Bailee's Print-on-Demand Database also offers side-by-side comparisons.
• How to Choose a Print on Demand Publisher: an informative article by Skylar Hamilton Burris.
• Electronic Subsidy Publishing: An Inexpensive Alternative? Moira Allen examines the pros and cons of fee-based electronic and POD publishing.
• The POD Quandary: Brenda Rollins takes another look at the pros and cons of POD services.
• POD-dy Mouth is a blog that tracks all things POD. Among many other interesting and informative items, it features an interesting series of Q&A sessions with established agents and editors about their attitudes toward books from POD services.
• An article assessing the pitfalls of POD services from the true self-publisher's perspective: The Truth About POD Publishing, by David Taylor.
• Michael Larocca, another author, describes his very specific reasons for choosing a POD service in Print on Demand: A Definition and a Comparison.
• Print on Demand, One Year Later: this article by Adam Barr, who published a book with POD service iUniverse, highlights some of the difficulties and frustrations authors who use such a service may encounter.
• A more positive perspective on the POD service experience is provided in this series of interviews with writers who published with Xlibris, 1st Books Library, (now Author House) and iUniverse.
• Beyond Vanity Fare? This 2003 article from Publishing Trends magazine reports on the kinds of changes that POD services have undertaken in order to provide their authors with more options.
• Promoting Fiction Without Breaking Your Budget: Is it Even Possible? This article by writer Conny Bryceland details some of the challenges faced by authors who choose POD-based independent publishers.
• True Stories About PublishAmerica: Authors' own accounts of their experiences with one of the more infamous POD-based author mills (Writer Beware has received more than 100 complaints about this self-styled "traditional" publisher).

Pitfalls

Warnings and Cautions for Writers--Print on Demand

• Julie Duffy, former Director of Author Services at fee-based POD Xlibris, offers a series of print-on-demand articles that provide a good overview of the POD process, from the technology itself to sales and contract concerns. There's some very useful information here about the technical issues you need to consider if you're thinking of POD.

• Clea Saal's Books and Tales website provides comparisons of the services of a number of fee-based PODs, as well as a series of articles on the stages of the POD publication process (note: Writer Beware has received complaints about a few of the publishers listed here).

• Supply and (Print on) Demand, an article by Jaclyn Pare for Poets & Writers, provides a good, if slightly dated, overview of both the hope and the hype surrounding POD, and discusses the marketing challenges that fee-based POD-published writers face.
   
• Electronic Subsidy Publishing: An Inexpensive Alternative? by Moira Allen examines the pros and cons of fee-based electronic and POD publishing.
• E-author Karen Weisner discusses the differences between subsidy and non-subsidy digital publishing, as well as the different kinds of fee-based e- and POD publishers, in Electronic Publishing: Subsidy vs. Non-Subsidy.
• Self-Publishing: Is it for You? An article from writer Thomas M. Sipos on the pros and cons of publishing via POD, with an interesting discussion of the traditional stigma attached to pay-to-publish, and possible ways to cope with it.An interesting article assessing the pitfalls of fee-based POD from the true self-publisher's perspective: The Truth About POD Publishing, by David Taylor.

• Also from Thomas M. Sipos, Marketing Through Amazon addresses that perennial literary mystery--the meaning of Amazon.com sales rankings. This is a very useful article for any POD-, e-, or self-published author.

   

• Print on Demand, One Year Later: this article by Adam Barr, who published a book with fee-based POD iUniverse, highlights some of the difficulties and frustrations fee-based POD authors may encounter.

• A more positive perspective on the fee-based POD experience is provided in this series of interviews with writers who published with Xlibris, 1st Books Library, and iUniverse.

POD publishers

• 1stBooks Library
• ActionTales
• AuthorHouse
• Authors Online
• Aventine Press
• BiblioBooks
• Booklocker
• BookPublisher
• BookSurge Publishing
• Cork Hill Press
• eBook Stand
• Equilibrium Books
• Global Book Publisher
• Golden Pillar Publishing
• Gom Publishing
• Great Unpublished
• Heliographica

Publishers

• Addison-Wesley Professional Computing and Engineering
• O'Reilly and Associates
• Computing McGraw-Hill
  • McGraw-Hill - Beta Books
• Prentice Hall Professional Technical Reference
  • Promotions
• Wrox Press Inc.
• Microsoft Press Computers books and interactive products on Microsoft technology.
• MCP
  • Sybex Inc.
  • Waite Group Press
• Wiley Computer Publishing
• MIS : Press and M&T Books
• SIGS Publications
• Abacus Computer Books & Software
• Adobe Press

Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc. - publishes computer books, and the Linux Journal.

• ALC Press - publisher of books and specialized software related to local area networks. Focus is on Novell's NetWare and security.
• Artech House - books and software for high-technology professionals.
• BHV Publishing Group - publishing house issusing computer literature in Russian.
• Business and Vocational Employment - creators of Step by Step software training manuals, explaining the latest spreadsheets, word processors, and other office computer applications.
• Coriolis Group Books
• Dorset House Publishing Co - source for books on computer related topics.
• Hayden Books - publisher of computer-related reference products for professionals who design, create, deliver, manage, and distribute creative works.
• Helion - publisher of quality computer related books.
• Manning Publications - publisher of computer books in print and HTML formats.
• maranGraphics - Canada's computer book publisher.
• No Starch Press - computer book publisher.

Vendors Publishing

• Microsoft Press
  • ResourceLink -- free 15 day trial of Resource Kits
• IBM Redbooks
  • TCPIP Tutorial and Technical Overview
• Novell
• SunSoft Press

Random Findings

• California Computer Books
• CompuBooks
• Computer Manuals On-Line Bookstore
• Curious Cat Computer Books
• OpAmp Technical Books
• Open Book Systems
• Powell's Books
• Quantum Books
• Roswell Internet Book Store
• Stacey's Professional Bookstores
• Wordsworth Books
• WorkSys International Bookstore

Publisher's org.

• Canadian Electronic Scholarly Network (CESN) -- Provides information on the Electronic Publishing Promotion Project (EPPP) and on other electronic publishing projects, especially Canadian initiatives.
• Citation -- Resources for Canadian publishers and publishing professionals.
• Electronic Publishing Association LLC -- An open international association of firms, companies and individuals dealing with language teaching and electronic publishing.
• Graphic Communications Today -- Site for Graphic Communications Association (GCA), the leading technical management association in the publishing, printing, and information technologies industries.
• International Printing & Publishing in Development Council -- Workgroup of professionals in printing and publishing sectors of developing countries.
• Newsletter Publishers Association - Represents the interests of and provides information to publishers of for-profit newsletters and specialized information services.
• Small Publishers Association of North America [SPAN] - Book-selling ideas and money-making strategies for independent presses and self-publishers.
• Women in Publishing - Promotes the status of women in the industry. Our site features training and meeting programmer, reports, mentoring network and international contacts.

Etc

Society

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War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes :  Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce :  Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS :  Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development :  Scripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month :  How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater�s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

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