Tim O'Reilly
Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O'Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the Web 2.0 Summit, Strata: The Business of Data, and many others. O'Reilly's Make: magazine and Maker Faire has been compared to the West Coast Computer Faire, which launched the personal computer revolution. Tim's blog, the O'Reilly Radar "watches the alpha geeks" to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim is also a partner at O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, O'Reilly's early stage venture firm, and is on the board of Safari Books Online.
Travelers Tales wins Lowell Thomas Awards Again
Most people don't know about my "other" publishing company, which I started in 1994 with my brother James and his writing partner Larry Habegger, Travelers Tales. Our first book, Travelers Tales Thailand, won the Society of American Travel Writers prestigious Lowell Thomas Award for best travel book of the year. We've won it numerous times since. James just sent me…
Computer Book Market Surges (Way to Go, Barnes & Noble!)
As many of you know, we track the progress of the computer book market via a weekly feed from Nielsen Bookscan, which sends out to publishers point-of-sale data on the top 10,000 computer books (yes, there are that many, and more!). Recently, we began cheering when we saw the chart below, which shows the computer book market breaking out of…
The Virtues of Print in a Web 2.0 World
Dale Dougherty, the publisher of Make: Magazine did a brief interview with Publishing Executive Magazine, which included some great thoughts on how print publishers can harness the power of Web 2.0 while also playing to their own strengths. INBOX: How can magazine publishers best capitalize on Web 2.0 for their own publications? DOUGHERTY: One idea is to ask yourself the…
Reading Books on the iPhone
O'Reilly Missing Manual editor Peter Meyers just did a great review (with screen shots) of how well the iPhone works for reading. His conclusion: I took a look at three different kinds of content: a book from O’Reilly’s Safari online reading library, a Web site whose layout appeared especially readable on the iPhone, and a PDF. The verdict? iPhone-friendly Web…
bLink: Completing the Connection Between Analog and Digital
This morning's keynote speaker at TOC, Manolis Kelaidis, received a standing ovation as he described his project to integrate digital content into physical books via circuits printed in conductive ink on the same page as the text. From the description of his session: Books have inherent qualities that make them an irreplaceable medium, even today. They have survived unchanged for…
Nature Precedings: Early Access to Scientific Results
Timo Hannay, Nature's Director of Web Publishing, sent out the following note in email: Since you've been kind enough to express an interest in Nature web projects in the past, I thought I'd let you know about our latest baby: Nature Precedings. The traditional way for scientists to share their research results is through journals. These have the benefit of…
Buy O'Reilly Books by the Chapter
One of the compelling lessons of the digital music revolution was that people wanted to acquire and share songs, not albums. The analogies to books are imperfect, because books tend to be more of an essential organic whole than albums, but even with books, especially reference or tutorial books, it's certainly possible that someone wants only part of a book….
TOC Conference Next Week
I'm really looking forward to our Tools of Change for Publishing Conference next week, which we call TOC for short. While O'Reilly long ago moved beyond thinking of ourselves as just a publisher, book publishing is still a big part of what we do. But over the years, we've had to re-think publishing as the outward form of what we…
How Google Books is Changing Academic History
Peter Brantley writes in email: "a Berkeley grad student disses the experience of the Berkeley library system and lauds Google." Jo Guldi, the author of that blog entry, wrote: "I was idly trying a search on "roads" to see what sort of a literature would turn up for the period of my dissertation research, 1740-1850. I didn't expect much. I've…
Journalism Through Computer Programming
As I've noted previously, Adrian Holovaty, the creator of Django and the Chicagocrime.org mashup, gives a great talk entitled Journalism Through Computer Programming. I refer to it often in my own talks on the future of publishing. Adrian's point is that the various jobs of journalism — gathering news, exercising editorial judgment, and presenting the story — can all be…