[hakaaaaak]

Soulless? Now, look. O'Reilly has gone downhill, but so has just about everything. The economy made people cut corners and care less about quality or customer service (where the customer in this case is you, the writer). But if they kept the same standards they had before while book sales dwindled, they would be bankrupt. That is the cold hard fact of it, and it is sad. We'd like to think that quality is always rewarded, but paper is becoming less relevant, and ebooks can be hacked and torrent'd + magnet'd or just plain shared. Any data based business whether it is books, music, or otherwise, is in the shitter and looking for a new gig. I by no means think that litigation and DRM are the answer; fear and bad cryptography are never the answer. But, these people don't have many options, and they are going to make bad choices.

[hakaaaaak]

In addition, based on what Tim O'Reilly said in response, it sounds like the author was incredibly overdemanding compared to their typical author, and would have benefited from a small high-end custom publishing house. O'Reilly would be a great way to get published for anything that is primarily print; not a book on design with precise requirements, it would seem.