Friday, April 21, 2006

Books, Publishers, & the Community

Tim O'Reilly has been posting about the book market over the last couple of days, and it's been quite informative. He calls out Apress, Wrox, and O'Reilly as outperforming the current market

Jim Minatel (of Wrox) has posted a response. He said something that really struck a chord with me:

So, I'm happy to see that Apress's rep is improving and O'Reilly's rep is strong, as always. But Wrox? We're on the right track too. Competition is good for the customer, so we'll just keep getting better.

As an occasional blogger for two of these three publishers (here and here), I enjoy seeing their continued success. From a wider perspective, I agree with Jim's point that the competition is good for all of us. Right now all three of them (plus Manning) are chasing the Pragmatic Programmers in the Ruby book space (well, two of them are, I've not seen anything from Wrox yet).

I've been talking to people at a number of publishers about getting into the Ruby pool for a couple of years now. I won't kid myself and think that I tipped things, but I'm very glad to see that the tipping point has been reached. I'm looking forward to a big batch of Ruby and Rails books coming out over the next six months, I think it will be good for the community and good for the publishers.


This post is part of a collection of articles about Publishing, Growing Markets, and Books.

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