Tim,

I was trying to find someone with technical books on CD or cassette. I work in the Washington D.C. area and the average commute is approx. 1hr 15min each way. It would be great if it was possible to make use of this time. I understand that there are generally a great deal of charts and diagrams that go along with these types of books but perhaps these could be part of the package in a 8 1/2 by 11 flip chart (with disclaimer of course about not looking at while driving). This seems to be a good opportunity for O'Reilly.

Rob

Rob,

There's a further dimension to this question, and that is one of distribution channels for such a product. The problem is that books on tape are a specialized medium, not carried by that many stores (or for that matter, desired by that many consumers). This means that the unit volume is low, and the costs for doing something like this very high. This makes it fairly uneconomic.

I really do like the idea, and in fact, I already tried something very like it. In the early days of the Internet craze, I helped to fund a non-profit startup called Internet Talk Radio, which did NPR-like online content--interviews with leading internet developers and so on. We actually issued a number of these interviews on tape for listening to in the car, but eventually dropped the project because even though the people who bought them loved them, there didn't seem to be enough demand to keep doing it.

Just recently, Carla Bayha, the computer book buyer at Borders, gave me a poke about this. She wondered if we were just ahead of our time, and whether we ought to try again. It could now be worthwhile--and what's more, that something more explicitly tutorial would work better. I can't imagine doing the kind of package you talk about, complete with diagrams and so forth, since the cost of producing that would be greater than the cost of throwing in the whole book! But I could imagine some tapes that took the introductory, more conceptual chapters from certain books, and made them into something that you could listen to to get the big picture on a technology.

Still, we have so much on our plate that I can't imagine making this a high priority. Maybe if lots of people tell us they'd love this, we might find a lull when we could give it another try, but I'm sorry to say that you can't expect it any time soon.

--Tim

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