[educating]

If Tim reads this:

Tim, you didn't fail. The industry has failed. For the past few-to-several years, books on technology have been obsolete by the time they are written- not just published, so you can't make money off of selling even digital copies of books. Developers read about the latest technology in project readme's (markdown formatted in GitHub), a wiki, one or more blogs, StackOverflow, and so on.

What else could your company do to stay relevant? I really have no idea. Posts on your site that come up in Google are often outdated, so O'Reilly to me is at most a place where developers that want to give talks and lectures can publish a book, which probably won't sell much. Maybe it will boost their resume or help them get more contract work? I really have no idea why people give talks and write books anymore. It seems like a waste of time that could be spent developing. Developing good code makes you relevant now.

I just feel sorry for the whole situation. I would have hoped will all of the publishing money from the 1990's and early 2000's, you'd own your own island, where you'd be on the beach drinking Coronas. But instead, the company has apparently tanked. That sucks. I liked the animal-covered books.

[iyulaev]

Good observation but I disagree, to some extent. Technical books that teach low-level knowledge and technologies will always become obsolete quickly. But books that enable the reader to understand deep concepts rather than shallow technologies have a much longer half-life. This is similar to the complaint that engineering school is always "behind the technology curve" which is nonsense. You don't go to school to learn technology, instead, you learn the basis underlying it. This latter knowledge changes much more slowly. A good technical book should aim to teach the same.

[chx]

Indeed. When do you think SQL and Relational Theory will be outdated? And, do you think you can learn that from a wiki or a blog?

[VLM]

Even deeper, something like regular expressions, how do they work?

Or shallower (sort of?) you can't sell a cookbook of "whats the regular expression in perl to match the first word of a sentance" because we have google for that, but you can sell a style guide type book like "Modern Perl" where you probably could google everything in that book, but it would take 1000 different searches and not have a common voice.

[epsylon]

Relevant abstruse goose comic. http://abstrusegoose.com/531

[vidarh]

His company hasn't tanked. I think you might have skipped the part about how they've in recent years have put tens of millions in the bank. They are making more money now than what they did when the book publishing market peaked around 2000.

The article is not about the failure of his company, but about what mistakes he think he made along the way.