Right, I guess the question is, "for an authorship capable of self-publishing, is your deal fair enough?" Again, I can totally see how novelists are basically obliged to take the deals offered by the publishing groups, because they are most likely not going to be able to gather the required knowledge to self-publish in anything resembling a timely manner. But with O'Reilly's authors, a publishing house is a convenience, not a necessity, worthy of a fair price, not the total pwnage and incompetence typical in the field and recounted in this piece ("...I was paying for it dearly, allowing O’Reilly to retain all but a small fraction of net sales").
So again, if O'Reilly is going to treat their authors like helpless novelists who've typed out their manuscript on an old-school mechanical typewriter and have no chance of self-publishing without years of effort and training, why don't they just start publishing novels? Is there really a market for a classical publishing arrangement when your authorship is perfectly capable of self-publishing, but would just prefer not to do so?
Why would a novelist be less capable of self-publishing than technical authors? Do technical authors have bigger garages to keep their book stock in? Do they live closer to mail depots? Do they have better sales skills for negotiating with distributors?
Novelists are less likely to be technically inclined than people writing books on programming languages. I was careful to make this distinction in order to avoid this pedantry when I specified the class of novelist that still writes out manuscripts on a mechanical typewriter. Technically competent novelists may well be in the same predicament as O'Reillys' authors. I didn't say all novelists were technically incompetent. Please curb your outrage.
My dual point was that you look down on novelists as being archaic typewriter-users, and that there is a lot more to publishing than the technical aspects of layout or ebook formats. Please curb your prejudice.
Please read more carefully. Your "dual point" is meaningless noise. I didn't say all novelists were archaic typewriter users. The class of novelists that are not "helpless ... typewriter [users]" are not included in my statement which was specifically restricted to "helpless ... typewriter [users]". Novelists, however, are definitely more likely to be helpless typewriter users than the authorship of O'Reilly's publications, however. Please curb your outrage. It's trite pedantry.
You are still missing my main point: publishing is more than ebook conversion or maybe a bit of layout. Significantly more - and your painting of 'typewriter users' as being technically helpless, even if correct, does not bleed through to the other aspects of publishing. Please curb your prejudice.
Novelists, however, are definitely more likely to be helpless typewriter users than the authorship of O'Reilly's publications, however.
Yes, I agree - 0.1% is more likely than 0.0%, given that pretty much no-one uses typewriters these days, except perhaps the archaic stereotypical 'novelist' in your head. Take your accusations of pedantry elsewhere if you're going to make an argument based on an effectively non-existent demographic.
Edit: a significant part of what a publisher does, which you may not realise, it editing. Technical authors aren't better than any others when it comes to writing well (and the stereotype is that they're worse). Good editing has turned many a pig's ear into a silk purse.
As I mentioned, for those with the skill, time, patience, and determination, any traditional publishing deal, including O'Reilly, isn't worth it. But I think you're overestimating the amount of O'Reilly authors who can do (and are interested in doing, and have time for) every little thing required to produce, market, and distribute paper and ebooks.
Here on HN we're all hackers who like to roll up our sleeves; but O'Reilly's vast catalog isn't all written by hackers. I doubt even a majority is. O'Reilly doesn't need to start selling novels because their authors appear to be happy with the traditional tradeoff. If more weren't, then O'Reilly wouldn't exist today. After all self-publishing is nothing new. Vanity presses have been around for centuries.
Just like we'd chuckle at the guy who says, "You want how much to make a web site? Don't you just put a picture at the top and write some text?" so too would O'Reilly chuckle at us for saying, "They want how much for their percentage? Don't they just turn on a printer and convert a .doc file to .mobi with Calibre?"
Here on HN we're all hackers who like to roll up our sleeves
I think you're very right about this, but there's even more to it. When O'Reilly started, getting a book published was like getting a chip design fabricated. You had professionals who worked with software that cost thousands of dollars producing "camera ready" pages for printers, whose enormously expensive equipment required very special formats. And the end product had to go through a channel as a physical product being moved to tens of thousands of bookstores, because those incredibly fragmented physical sales locations were almost the only places books were sold.
It just didn't matter how much of a "roll up your sleeves" guy you were in that world (which I remember like it was yesterday.)
But that world is gone. These days, you can create your book entirely with free software as you sit on a beach, and you can sell it in electronic form off your own website to the entire planet (without leaving the beach.) You can do all the marketing, all the selling, collect your paychecks, and use them to buy stuff, all from that little spot in the sand.
O'Reilly is still needed by some, but for "roll up your sleeves hackers", I think their time has past.
So again, if O'Reilly is going to treat their authors like helpless novelists who've typed out their manuscript on an old-school mechanical typewriter and have no chance of self-publishing without years of effort and training, why don't they just start publishing novels? Is there really a market for a classical publishing arrangement when your authorship is perfectly capable of self-publishing, but would just prefer not to do so?