Tim,

Thanks for being the advocate of reasonably-priced well-written books to help computer professionals. This brings me to the question of why you guys didn't write any OS/2-specific titles? OS/2 has certainly been an underdog in the market, but still runs more computer infrastructure than most realize.

-- Mitchell Teixeira

Mitchell,

We've been asked this question many times over the years, and the answer is always the same: we write about technologies we use. Unlike other publishers, who chase topics that they hear are hot, we really want to get under the hood.

In order for us to get into a new area, we need someone either on our payroll or whom we trust to help guide our program. What's really needed? What kinds of issues are users struggling with? What do the experienced users know that the less experienced lust after with delight and a touch of envy?

But that's a general answer to a very specific question, and I have to say that even if we had a real OS/2 fanatic in our midst, someone who could develop a publishing program with the kind of depth and purpose that we look for in an O'Reilly publishing program, I'm not sure we'd step up to the plate on this one.

Frankly, I have a hard time believing that OS/2 will ever be a serious contender in the operating system space. OS/2 partisans tend to love their software, which is a great thing in my book--we respond well to this kind of passion--but the market seems to have a small menu of choices, and right now, OS/2 is not really on that menu for most people. And at bottom, you need significant numbers to make a book work. A pretty small percentage of people who use a particular software package actually buy books--you have only to consider the situation of Windows, with a hundred million plus users, and the most successful books with sales only in the hundreds of thousands of copies...

There's a lot more "faddishness" driving computer book sales than we'd all like to think. And much as OS/2 might have its partisans and its redoubts where it holds the high ground, it doesn't have that great mass of curious would-be readers saying "I've got to know about this."

Now obviously, that hasn't stopped us before. We've often published books on topics with small markets, only to see those markets explode as the wider world discovered the technology. Heck, we first wrote about the Web when there were only about 300 web sites. But OS/2 is not poised to explode--it's had huge press exposure and marketing committments from large companies, and it didn't catch on.

I hate to say this, since I'd love to have the resources to publish high quality books for every market where there are users with passion and experience, but unfortunately, we can't do everything, and we have to pick things that seem to us to be important either to a large group of users, or else demonstrate some leading edge technology that we think is important for the industry to recognize.

--Tim

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