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Wired Magazine Profile of Tim O'Reilly
An anonymous reader writes "Best-selling author Steven Levy has a new profile of techincal publisher Tim O'Reilly over at Wired." From the article: "... O'Reilly himself has operated for years under the radar. Most nontechies, if they know him at all, know him by the eponymous name of his publishing company. It has a 15 percent share of the $400 million computer-book market but casts a much bigger shadow. O'Reilly books tend to colonize entire sections at Borders and Barnes & Noble, their distinctive cover design as recognizable as the Tide circle on a box of detergent or the Apple logo on the lid of a PowerBook. In serif type over a glossy white background, there is the title, often naming a computer language or protocol familiar to codeheads and gibberish to everyone else (JavaServer Faces; Essential CVS; Using Samba, 2nd Edition). The illustrations are realistically rendered pen-and-ink drawings of animals."
My O'Reilly _Programming perl_ book has survived unspeakable abuse for 10 years, without dropping a single page from its binding. While its content, layout and clarity of editorial is unparalleled in my three decades of paging through paper documentation, inviting thousands of hours of use. That's a quality product. Keep up the good work, Tim!
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make install -not war
That figure sounds awfully low. Are they lumping in all the "windoze wanker's guide to nose-picking on the intarweb" books in the same category or something?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Tim Oreilly has a blog...
http://radar.oreilly.com/tim/
the other posters are interesting as welll
http://radar.oreilly.com/
I accidentally met O'Reilly at a Linux conference in North Carolina a number of years back. We chatted it up about Linux, where we thought it might be going, what we thought Linux might say at the keynote address (turned out to be the year Linus said he would, "never, never, again write code to minimize memory to small memory machines...", a scary statement, but interestingly enough still to this day Linux is comparably resource thrifty), and small talk (not the language).
He was soft spoken and unassuming. Somewhere in the course of discussion we introduced ourselves to each other. I remember walking away thinking what a nice guy, and an interesting coincidental name with the publisher. Yeah, it was the Tim O'Reilly, and I didn't figure it out until I saw him speak later that day. Wow.
His presentation was low key, more about rallying the community than circling the wagons. Here was truly a man with a vision and understanding about the fabric of technology. Oh that the leaders of many more of our technology companies could be of his ilk.
(As an interesting aside (to me), this was also the same conference at which I met ESR, same way, just striking up a conversation after a presentation. When time began to run out I told him I had to move along, I wanted to get to the Eric Raymond presentation. He smiled and let me go, telling me he'd see me there. LOL)
In the past, when I'd needed a book on subject X, I'd just go the bookstore and pick up the OReilly Subject X In A Nutshell or the Definitive Guide To Subject X. Lately, I've been burned by a few duds. The quality over at ora.com is slipping. Now, they're only producing something like two orders of magnitude more books than they were 10 years ago, but still, it makes me sad. They're on the same level as Wrox now. Not that there's anything awful about that, Wrox is pretty damn good, but they've lost the default go-to position, for me at least.
Was when I found Tim's business card at the Cafe In bldg 18 at Microsoft. It was like finding RMS *buying* a beer or something...
Most nontechies, if they know him at all, know him by the eponymous name of his publishing company.
If you asked my parents they would think of the loudmouthed guy with a TV show. I'm sure they've never heard of the publishing company... in any case not everybody who is "techie" knows about O Reilly, I didn't until about two years ago, or at least I was aware of the books but never bought one.
It's very hard to make money out of publishing, so I guess the guy is a genius really. He's also got recognition. When I go into a shop I'll very likely buy the O'Reilly book out of the choices available because I know I'll get a solid number from a company worth supporting. So many other outfits are just faceless conglomerates owned by a monster toad somewhere. And with some topics, an O'Reilly book will be the only choice available anyway.
There is some competition, I guess. My local Borders has some nice titles from No Starch Press in among the O'Reilly ones. Too bad there isn't one title on Debian from anyone stocked, though. It would be good to see more No Starch books. They're a little more hip and sometime a row of O'Reilly can look a bit staid.
I once mail-ordered a book from O'Reilly and they sent me the wrong one. When I called them, they said they'd send out a replacement pdq (which they did) and told me I could keep the other, wrong one with their compliments. No need to inconvenience myself by returning it. It's a great book too. You have to respect a company like that.
Still have all my O'Reilly books. They are really well put together unlike most these days.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
...are nothing short of incredible and life-saving. I use my Python Pocket Reference almost daily, and it has been an invaluable resource. O'reilly is, and should be, the first place to look for technical writing, and almost always surpasses the competition in quality, clarity, and accuracy.
I am Spartacus
O'Reilly didn't used to publish a lot of Windows-specific book titles. They were cooler back in the era when they mainly published books for the classic UNIX tools (i.e. SED/Awk, the multi-volume X Windows Reference series (which is a quite COMPLETE reference for X if you run it bareboned with good old TWM) and even some of the BSD manual volumes. Toward the end of the 90's geek-chic sort of damaged the whole scene. Now they publish comix.
They do produce some of the best Windows-oriented books, of course. Actually almost the only ones worth purchasing. Lower screenshot-count (a fairly accurate measure of a Windoze book's worth) than many of the alternate publishers.
resigned
How dare you call this man an animal! Don't you have any respect for fine gentlemen?!
The animals on the covers are not pen-and-ink, they are based on 19th century woodcuts.
I generally love O'reilly books and also get quite a kick out of the O'Really parodies. Everything from "Windows NT's Infernal Filesystem" to "Practical UNIX Terrorism". These are great t-shirts if just for the look on a fellow techies face when they read the title.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
O'Reilly does seem to be a right-on visionary with a productive work ethic. I'm impressed that he's got 15% of the computer book market, with his high quality products. And his interviews have presented an articulate guy who's passionate about the right things, with a sharp BS detector.
I'm not as enthusiastic about _Wired_, though. Ever since I first saw their prelaunch ads on SF buses in 1993-4, they've seemed like the _Omni_ mag of high-tech. Breathless marketing hype that's usually wrong about the implications of any tech trend they opportunistically hump like an Aibo on Marshall McLuhan's leg. I tried reading that insufferable windbag Nicholas Negroponte's book, _Being Digital_, compiled from his "prescient" _Wired_ endpaper columns. I had thought he guessed wrong whenever I read them in a crapper in the 1990s. In retrospect, they're not even good for toilet paper. And the rest of the magazine holds up just as poorly. Except for that terrific epic by Neal Stephenson about "the longest wire in the world". Even _Wired_ couldn't taint Stephenson, and apparently not O'Reilly, either.
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make install -not war
As an engineer, I'll put this in engineering terms; O'Reilly books have a high signal to noise ratio. The amount of useful information that they contain per inch of shelf space is equaled by no other publisher, period.
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I always felt a reluctance to the O'Reilly book because I thought they were published by Bill O'Reillys publishing company (I'm not a big fan of Bill O'Reilly).
I always saw those books and thought "hell no, I won't support that son of a b***h".
After reading this story today I might actually tak a look at his books.
Waiting for you by the bridge
This was a- good article, but -I keep thinking- some-thing's wrong with it. I just can-'t put my finger on it,- though...
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
How can you not be stoked about Wired. After all, they were totally prescient about push media. They predicted that Castanet and Active X would RULE
They're not about hype. They're all about keepin' it real!
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Sadly, they aren't talking about the computer books, unless the 50-year-old guy at the gas station counter is a laid off DEC guy.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Everyone knows the high quality of ORA's technical books, but what about their travel books? I only know of them through the old ORA printed catalogs of the mid 90s. I've always assumed that the travel books would be to an equally high standard, but I've never actually seen one. If anyone has, I'd love to hear about them.
I've had the pleasure of seeing him speak twice. The first time was around '99 at UBC at some sort of thing ActiveState was putting on. At that point it was just plain cool to see the guy who publishes all the excellent books I'd been buying.
The next time was at the MySQL conference last April. After he did a keynote, I went up and talked to him. He had a few William Gibson references in his presentation. I asked him about that and we chatted for a few minutes. We exchanged business cards and that was about it. I was hoping to get him to sign his book of essays which I had picked up earlier at the conference, but I forgot in the middle of the conversation..
As lame as it may seem, it was pretty cool to get to talk to one of my heros. He's quite the optimitic dreamer and does it without an invasive corporate vision.
It's hard to believe that oreilly only has 15% of the tech book market -- 80% of my library is oreilly.
-- DrZaius - Minister of Sciences and Protector of the Faith
Well, before I trash Wired too badly, I have to say that I had a subscription ever since issue #2, until some time around early 2000, when I finally decided it "jumped the shark" and wasn't worth the space it was taking up on my bookshelf, much less the subscription price.
.com area millionaires, inflated I.T. salaries overall, and a tendency to glorify modern art and flashy/trendy doo-datd and gadgets poisoned Wired. The "fluff" became the "substance". The magazine got really thick in '99 with glossy full-page color ads for multi-thousand dollar designer watches, luxury cars and clothing. Then when it all came crashing down, the magazine went on a diet - losing about half of its thickness overnight. And quality never really came back..... You could comb a good article or two out of one, here or there. But it was best suited as something to download into your PDA for free using AvantGo, or via web links to specific articles of interest.
When it got started, I really enjoyed it. If nothing else, it seemed like most issues contained 1 really good interview with someone of importance in the tech. sector. It was the type of in-depth "we describe the person's character and workplace/home life in so much detail, you feel like you're watching this unfold on TV rather than reading" article, that really got them to make some statements that gave you insight into *why* they got where they were at that time, and where they thought their business was heading in the future. Plus, it had none of the editing you'd expect other mainstream rags would have done if they had conducted the same interview. (If the guy said "My main competitor fucked up!" - they printed it.)
They also seemed to be strong in scooping other science and tech. magazines on news about a new invention or interesting implementation of an existing technology (especially in medicine and biotech).
But it seemed like the combination of
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
IP geeks may be interested to know that the illustrations on O'Reilly's covers are generally public domain works from the Dover pictorial archive. Dover Publications, if you don't know, is an invaluable publishing house that specializes in budget-priced literature and art books (especially clip art); many, perhaps most, of their publications use public domain material.
(As an aside, you may also be interested to know that their clip art collections aren't entirely unemcumbered -- while the individual works are public domain, their collections are copyrighted derivative works, and they place limits on commercial use of art from their collections.)
I'm not as enthusiastic about _Wired_, though.
There have been some diamonds in that sea of coal. As you mention later on, the article "Mother Earth Motherboard" was possibly the greatest technical/historical article ever written. Here's Wired's copy. Here's another. And another.