From: Paul Murphy
Subject: Are "how to" books archaic?
At present, your focus appears to remain on "how to" books. Some of those are quite good; I have six here. But growth in that group has got to be coming to an end as the rate of change in technology continues to increase along with Internet access to free, and current, technical information.
So how do you see your market progressing? Do O'Reilly buyers become what they read, living encyclopedias of dated technical arcana? Or are you simply assuming that demographic replenishment will keep the company going?
I find your question a bit hard to parse. Do you think "how to" books aren't working because the life cycle of a book is out of step with the rate of change, leading people to online sources? Because, of course, the fact that technology is changing so fast means that people need more "how to" information all the time in order to keep up.
I agree very much with your premises, though. The rate of change is increasing. We're entering a period of greater change in technology than at any time in the past few decades. Everything we thought we knew is wrong, as we reach the end of the personal computer era and enter the network era. The Internet as we've known it was really just a networking add-on to the PC, but now we're starting to see the Internet itself emerge as the platform. There's a fundamental paradigm shift, as fundamental as the shift from earth-centric Ptolemaic astronomy to the solar-centric Copernican vision.
Paradigm failures abound. Linux critics say that Linux is not yet as easy to use as Windows or Mac OS X. Linux partisans point out the progress of OpenOffice, Gnome, and the Gimp. Neither one points to the great, easy-to-use applications of the Internet era--Google, amazon.com, PayPal, maps.yahoo.com--all of which run on Linux or equivalents (maps.yahoo.com runs on FreeBSD). The browser frontend may live on a PC, but the application lives somewhere in the space between the two.
Even more traditional PC applications no longer reside solely on a local device. Rip a music CD, and the artist and song names are automatically looked up on CDDB, an Internet site. This is the new face of web services--application components residing remotely.
Distributed peer-to-peer applications like Napster, Kazaa, and BitTorrent, or distributed computation applications like SETI@home, take the model even further, residing on millions of cooperating computers.
So yes, the rate of change is increasing. But this will lead to more need for "how to" books, not less. I believe that most developers haven't yet grasped just how completely the programming model is about to change. Of course, the leading developers have known this for a long time. But the great bulk of the market is just entering this uncharted territory.
That being said, I agree that books aren't always the answer. Particularly when things are moving very quickly, the development cycle of a book doesn't work. That's why we started publishing online in 1993, and why the O'Reilly Network is so core to our business.
What's more, as the new paradigm takes hold, I believe that there will be further opportunities to expand what we do online. Part of the long-term strategy behind Safari is once we have thousands of books online, we can build new kinds of services against what is now the most comprehensive technical information database available for computers and software.
Tim
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