O'Reilly

Last Thursday, Tim O’Reilly announced that the company named after him is shutting down its Tools of Change practice area and laying off Kat Meyer and Joe Wikert. In explaining this decision, O’Reilly offers background that ultimately reveals more than he may have intended. He starts with the thinking that kicked off the Tools of Change franchise in 2006: 

Publishing isn’t about putting ink on paper, and moving blocks of said paper through warehouses to readers. It’s about knowledge dissemination, learning, entertainment, codification of subject authority…

The tools we use to find content are changing and becoming more intelligent. Google can now distinguish between content that people find actually useful and content that has been perfectly optimized to game their system. Obviously, it is in Google's interest not to be gamed.

To all you publishers who are struggling and stressing about catching up on the latest techniques for search engine optimization (SEO) in the hopes that your books will become more easily discovered by searchers:

Stop. Take a breath. SEO is dead. We've entered the days beyond SEO. We're now playing a new game.

Since the earliest days of search (remember AltaVista?!), search engines have been locked in a battle with Web developers for control over their search engine results pages.

Ignoring your digital readership potential is not an option; and treating e-books as an afterthought by offering up a recycled printer's PDF is not a digital strategy. For some types of highly formatted content, a PDF version may be useful, but if that's all you do, you'll be leaving significant distribution and enhancement options (aka revenue) on the table.

The Publishing Business Virtual Conference & Expo officially opened its "virtual" doors with more than 900 book publishing executives in attendance on Thurs., Oct. 29 for Digital Content Day @ Your Desk

How does making a book—or a portion of it—available for free affect its sales? Does piracy erode sales or drive interest?

It’s a good time to be a professional publisher. This industry segment continues to post above-average sales growth, while many of its publishers are at the forefront of the digital revolution that has been transforming the way we publish and read books. According to the Book Industry Study Group’s “Book Industry Trends 2007” report, sales of professional books increased by 3.2 percent in 2006 over the previous year, from $8.6 billion to $8.9 billion. This increase ranked professional publishing as the third-largest growth segment in dollar sales, behind only religious books (5.6-percent growth) and adult trade (3.9-percent growth). A ‘Glutted’ Market While the

Technology is fundamentally transforming publishing. From generating ideas to packaging information to delivering products and beyond, everything is changing. Tim O’Reilly, the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, the renowned Silicon Valley-based computer/technology publisher, believes that many publishers are woefully unprepared. His company, one of the leading computer-book publishing companies in the world, is at the forefront of the technologies that have directly shaped publishing of the past, present and future. When I spoke with O’Reilly, he was getting ready to board a plane to New York City to keynote Google’s “Unbound” conference on Jan. 18. The conference was billed as “a day

LA VERGNE, Tenn. - Ingram Publisher Services Inc., a subsidiary of Ingram Book Group Inc. that specializes in providing distribution services to publishers, and O'Reilly Media Inc., an independent publisher of computer books, today announced they have entered into an exclusive distribution agreement to begin September 2005. Under the new agreement Ingram will be the exclusive distributor of O'Reilly books, handling retail customer service, order-entry and fulfillment. "Our partnership with Ingram allows us to give our current customers better, faster service," said Laura Baldwin, O'Reilly's CFO/COO. "Plus, they offer the services we need to expand our international business, as well as grow our account base in

Book publishers know the importance of fast time to market, and in few industry sectors is it more crucial than high-tech publishing. High-tech book titles become obsolete the moment a new operating system, programming language or other technology is introduced. At O'Reilly & Associates—a publisher of books covering everything from the Internet to XML, Mac OS X, open source, Java and Web services—accelerating the publishing process can literally mean the difference between success and failure for many titles. When the company decided to publish "Running Mac OS X Panther" in late 2003, O'Reilly and the impending author, James Duncan Davidson, knew