O'reilly: Reasons to be exited

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Reasons To Be Excited! Text

Tim O’Reilly Founder & CEO O’Reilly Media February 11, 2009



If publishing is about to melt down, just think about the bonuses!


The Beginning of the Modern Era


These were not good times either


The Fall of Constantinople




1. We live in an amazing time! ! Billions of people are coming out of poverty and joining the world of ideas. ! “It’s as if we had a supercomputer and billions of our processors had been offline.” --economist Alex Tabarrok, at TED !


The internet and the brain





Phones are everywhere




2. People are reading - a lot!









3. Curation still matters

!

Clay Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality: http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html (2003)












Using social media effectively ! Don’t just make announcements ! Reflect and amplify your community ! Bestow status on your authors and partners ! Talks about issues and ideas that matter to you ! Show passion and personality


5. People are paying for access to information ! It’s not just advertising! ! Internet access fees: $25.8 billion! ! Music: $2.3 billion ! Games: $1.8 billion ! Video downloads: $353 million ! Mobile email and alerts: $1.3 billion ! So: don’t get caught up in this idea that no one will pay online! Go out and get your share! !

*2007 Figures from Veronis Suhler Stevenson Communications Industry Forecast



Content Ubiquity! ! Make your content available wherever your readers want to find it, in whatever format they want it ! DRM is an obstacle ! Share what you learn so we can all get better faster together!


Sales ratio of downloadable electronic formats on oreilly.com PDF MOBI EPUB


eBooks 10% of sales in 2011? How about 50%?! ! People choose print OR electronic. Only about 8% choose bundles ! Meanwhile, our market share of Direct sales of print & downloadable print books in retail ebooks from oreilly.com hasn’t dropped.



Safari Books Online ! Joint venture with Pearson Technology Group ! Subscription service ! 10x the revenue of downloadable ebooks for us ! Now contains more than 8000 titles from more than 30 technical and business book publishers ! Now O’Reilly’s #2 channel (behind only Amazon) in revenue returned to publisher and authors ! Growing 30% YoY ! Entirely additive for us: we’ve actually gained market share in print book market since we launched in 2000


But remember ! Don’t just think about the business model - think about the customer! ! For reference and training, search and quick answers trump the standalone book ! Subscription may not work for all genres ! It’s the content that matters, not the format ! “You pick the hat to fit the head”


6. Participation Drives Revenue ! When users are given early access to books under development, revenue in Safari more than doubles Performance of Rough Cuts in Safari

Standard title

Rough Cut

Former Rough Cut


Real World Haskell • • • •

• •

• •

Participatory platform developed by the authors 7500 comments during the book!s development, and another 2000 since. At least 800 people left their names by the time we reached the 7500 mark. Only 10% of comments were left anonymously, because we offered a listing in the acknowledgments to everyone who left their names (we didn't ask for email addresses). 21 people left at least 75 comments each, each of which is close to as good as you'd hope for from a normal tech review process. In other words, we got maybe 7 times as much free feedback just from our top 2.5% of reviewers as a normal book manages from its entire review team. Almost 80 people left between 15 and 75 comments each, giving us another factor of 10 increase in feedback. Based on names we recognised, the commenters ranged from tenured professors with 20 years of experience, through grad students, professional programmers, and Perl and Ruby hackers, on to novice programmers.




Collaborate! ! The web teaches us: writing is no longer a solitary activity! ! Involve your authors and your readers in developing your content


7. Mobile Reading Taking Off ! Stanza - downloaded over 1,300,000 times ! Kindle - more first year units than iPod (estimated) ! Sony reader 300K units

! iPhone creating a paid app ecosystem!




iPhone App outsold print - but print book still the category bestseller


The Price/Volume Curve ! When we doubled the price from $4.99 to $9.99, volume dropped by 4x ! We went back to the lower price :-)

! Excited by Google’s idea of algorithmic pricing


It’s Not Just for Computer Books ! #3 on the iPhone app store book list


Safari Goes Mobile ! m.safaribooksonline.com - web content optimized for mobile devices ! Available Feb 23, free to subscribers ! Try it in beta (today only) Username: toc2009 Password: toc


Safari Goes Mobile ! m.safaribooksonline.com - web content optimized for mobile devices ! Available Feb 23, free to subscribers ! Try it in beta (today only) Username: toc2009 Password: toc


Safari Goes Mobile ! m.safaribooksonline.com - web content optimized for mobile devices ! Available Feb 23, free to subscribers ! Try it in beta (today only) Username: toc2009 Password: toc


Bookworm ! Created by Liza Daly ! A free EPUB reader ! Open source, DRM-free ! Doesn’t mean books are free - we sell epub on oreilly.com! ! Seamless reading across devices - start on your laptop, pick up where you left off on the phone ! http://bookworm.oreilly.com


7. Free and $$ Can Co-exist ! These books are all available from us or their authors under free redistribution licenses. See http://openbooks.oreilly.com ! Linux Network Administrator’s Guide - ~$3 million ! Writing Linux Device Drivers - $1.6 million ! Using Samba - $1.3 million ! Asterisk: The Definitive Guide - $500K ! Version Control with Subversion - $300K ! Real World Haskell - $128K (first two months)


Tens of Billions of MP3s “ripped”


Ripping & Burning a Book :-)

Photo: James Duncan Davidson


Google Book Search Mobile App ! Performs the same role as mp3 for music in making the new market possible


9.Taking a Road Trip

!

http://autos.canada.com/greatcanadianroadtrip/index.html


9.Taking a Road Trip

!

http://autos.canada.com/greatcanadianroadtrip/index.html


It’s not a tour of gas stations!


This might be where you end up

!

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/06/12/opinion/0613-GASPUMPS_index.html


10. People need what we do ! You are members of a great profession ! Billions of people are coming online, waiting to be taught, informed, entertained ! “The best way to predict the future is to invent it�*

*Alan Kay


10. People need what we do ! You are members of a great profession ! Billions of people are coming online, waiting to be taught, informed, entertained ! “The best way to predict the future is to invent it�*

*Alan Kay


For more information ! http://toc.oreilly.com ! http://radar.oreilly.com ! http://twitter.com/timoreilly ! http://twitter.com/toc ! http://twitter.com/oreillylabs


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