[camworld]

This is tough. I've known Tim for a long, long time and he's always been a stand-up guy with amazing ethics and vision. I also know Laurie and worked with her briefly when I was helping to co-author a long-forgotten O'Reilly book on Mozilla applications. She's a good editor.

I also tremendously respect Stephen Few's body of work and own all of his books. There is no doubt he's a leader in the field of information visualization.

What I think Stephen is missing here is a discussion about or the acknowledgement that the printed book industry is one of very low margins. It's entirely possible that the issues he is complaining about are a result of the O'Reilly print production managers choosing lower-quality sources and suppliers -- something O'Reilly doesn't have a history of. They pioneered the RepKover lay-flat binding, which costs a lot more than traditional binding. The cost of producing Stephen's book to the standards he expected was probably far too high for O'Reilly to have been able to make any profit on it at all without literally doubling the price. There is a reason that beautifully printed and produced architecture books, art history books and specialty books cost between $50 and $200 each.

[headbiznatch]

Everybody makes their own deal.

O'Reilly must have recognized by Mr. Few's demands that these expensive details mattered to him or else they would not have signed the contract. But they did. Belly-ache all day about the margins and practical difficulties inherent in printing a book to Mr. Few's standards, but they signed it to get the deal and then broke their word. What is he missing about that, the central theme of this piece?

P.S. $50 to $200? O'Reilly sells their poorly bound books at the low-to-middle of that range. You are not helping them by mentioning what a nicely printed book costs.

[ratherbefuddled]

I'm sure it's not what you're suggesting but low margins aren't an excuse for breaching a contract or doing a poor job of printing. If it can't be done at the right quality economically, it's better to not do the job at all which is what the contract seems to have been trying to guarantee.

Print media is in decline and will only lose more ground now to digital media, which of course has a significant cost advantage. Perhaps publishers should recognise that now and aim towards a niche of fewer very high quality prints that are as much aesthetic as practical. The price increase which is inevitable in any case as volumes drop might not look so bad then.