I think this is clearly a response to StackOverflow. If I can get a lot of high quality content on the sorts of things O'Reilly publishes books about in a free online place (StackOverflow) why would I waste money on purchasing their books?
Notice that they will be 'rewarding' contributions with points redeemable for books. This site exists because O'Reilly is afraid StackOverflow will result in a loss of sales of their books and they have no original idea on how to combat the problem.
I don't think so. I think getting people talking about the same topics in an environment where the books are always around will probably actually drive sales. Especially questions like "What language should I use for (X)?" "Oh, use (Rails|PHP|ASP.NET MVC)!" "Cool, I'll go grab a book on that..."
It probably won't drive a huge spike in sales, but I really doubt it'll hurt them.
A good publisher has nothing to fear from Stack Overflow.
I suspect the site exists instead because the company wants to have a web site with a lot of traffic but isn't willing to pay anyone to write things people want to read. Thus their solution is to reuse material from books and convince people to contribute original material in exchange for badges and coupons.
The company's launched quite a few experiments on the web, only to abandon them a couple of months later. Perhaps this one will last longer than three months; it appears they've actually put some money into it.
> I suspect the site exists instead because the company wants to have a web site with a lot of traffic but isn't willing to pay anyone to write things people want to read. Thus their solution is to reuse material from books and convince people to contribute original material in exchange for badges and coupons.
And the material not reused from books (both some posts and most of the answers so far, perhaps all of the answers so far) comes from various O'Reilly employees who have a new responsibility: "seeding O'Reilly answers."
I don't think StackOverflow replaces the need for books. However, Stack Overflow heavily advertises programming books, so creating something similar would be valuable to O'Reilly for visibility they could give their own books.
To focus on one thing, nearly all of the current posts appear to be snippets taken from their books, with prominently placed ads below. These are not questions: they're just advertisements. (I also wonder if the authors were asked about the use of their work in this way.) The posts that aren't by authors are by editors or other O'Reilly employees. The thing is sheer astroturfing, not a QA site.
It's sad to see a company that does something so well (their books are generally excellent) so desperate to capture every market. They feel a bit like Starbucks a few years ago.
Were the reddit devs aware that they were making those posts? I'm guessing yes, but I'm guessing that easily 50% of those "posters" over at O'Reilly Overflow have no idea what they've been up to.
Were the reddit devs selling their books by posting? (Yes, I understand that Reddit sells stuff, but the posts are not directly linked to selling what they're posting about. That's what makes the O'Reilly site astroturfing.)
I'd like to acknowledge the projects that have proceeded Answers and inspired us, such as SitePoint Forums (we distribute their books), StackOverflow, Yahoo! Answers, Knol, and many others
I might be blind to it, but I don't recall hearing of any newsworthy O'Reilly acquisitions well.. ever. Well, except Esther Dyson's Release newsletter.
Notice that they will be 'rewarding' contributions with points redeemable for books. This site exists because O'Reilly is afraid StackOverflow will result in a loss of sales of their books and they have no original idea on how to combat the problem.