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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."
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.
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.
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An even better way of remebering - the capital letter that begins each word looks like that camel. A Bactrian has two humps, and a Dromedary has one.