The Curator
Think of the last time you went into a bookstore and ended up carrying around a short stack of books with you. Now, in this particular made-up situation, you're only going to buy one of them. You're just having trouble making a decision.
How do you make the choice? Is it based on the author? The subject matter? The way the cover looks? The blurb on the back of the jacket?
There's a variety of answers, but I'm willing to bet that most people have never, ever based this kind of decision on who the publisher of the book was. In most realms, the publisher is irrelevant. The end reader doesn't care. When Malcolm Gladwell switched publishers a couple of books ago, my guess is that nobody outside of the book publishing industry even noticed.
This isn't actually true for me. I'm a computer programmer, and I read a lot of books in that vein. I know who all of the publishers are: O'Reilly, Pragmatic Programmers, Wrox, Apress, and Addison Wesley, to name a few of the more prominent ones. If I go into a bookstore and look for a book on a particular topic, and there are six books by six publishers on the same topic, then, all else being equal, I know which one I'm going to buy. (It would probably be the O'Reilly one.)
For book readers, this is really unusual. The publisher doesn't generally sway the purchase decision one way or another. Computer books publishers are notable in that they've mostly stuck to their guns and focused on serving one particular audience. Most publishers have extended themselves into all kinds of different lines of books, and in the process, they've made themselves largely irrelevant to readers.
Is it any surprise that most of them are in trouble now?
What makes a computer publisher like O'Reilly stand out is they understand that they're a (not to be diminutive) glorified middleman. Most publishers are. This is a difficult task to carry out, and it's become exponentially harder since the Internet came along and gave people an almost infinite choice of alternative things to read.
And despite this, O'Reilly has done remarkably well. Why? Partly because Tim O'Reilly is brilliant. But more importantly, because they're extremely good at one thing: curation.
An art gallery understands they only have so much space on their walls to hang art (and only so much money to spend on great pieces), so they take great care to understand what their visitors want to see. Then they put that on display. O'Reilly understands Uber-Geeks like me and what we're interested in reading, so they find experts on those topics and ask them to write books.
In a world where the long tail and infinite choice are becoming the norm, there are still plenty of groups of people willing to pay for judgment.
How do you make the choice? Is it based on the author? The subject matter? The way the cover looks? The blurb on the back of the jacket?
There's a variety of answers, but I'm willing to bet that most people have never, ever based this kind of decision on who the publisher of the book was. In most realms, the publisher is irrelevant. The end reader doesn't care. When Malcolm Gladwell switched publishers a couple of books ago, my guess is that nobody outside of the book publishing industry even noticed.
This isn't actually true for me. I'm a computer programmer, and I read a lot of books in that vein. I know who all of the publishers are: O'Reilly, Pragmatic Programmers, Wrox, Apress, and Addison Wesley, to name a few of the more prominent ones. If I go into a bookstore and look for a book on a particular topic, and there are six books by six publishers on the same topic, then, all else being equal, I know which one I'm going to buy. (It would probably be the O'Reilly one.)
For book readers, this is really unusual. The publisher doesn't generally sway the purchase decision one way or another. Computer books publishers are notable in that they've mostly stuck to their guns and focused on serving one particular audience. Most publishers have extended themselves into all kinds of different lines of books, and in the process, they've made themselves largely irrelevant to readers.
Is it any surprise that most of them are in trouble now?
What makes a computer publisher like O'Reilly stand out is they understand that they're a (not to be diminutive) glorified middleman. Most publishers are. This is a difficult task to carry out, and it's become exponentially harder since the Internet came along and gave people an almost infinite choice of alternative things to read.
And despite this, O'Reilly has done remarkably well. Why? Partly because Tim O'Reilly is brilliant. But more importantly, because they're extremely good at one thing: curation.
An art gallery understands they only have so much space on their walls to hang art (and only so much money to spend on great pieces), so they take great care to understand what their visitors want to see. Then they put that on display. O'Reilly understands Uber-Geeks like me and what we're interested in reading, so they find experts on those topics and ask them to write books.
In a world where the long tail and infinite choice are becoming the norm, there are still plenty of groups of people willing to pay for judgment.