I have a lot of books on my shelves that I have come to depend on from both Microsoft Press and O’Reilly Media, so I was interested to learn that these two publishers have announced that they will be partners starting November 30, 2009. In the partnership, O’Reilly will become the distributor for Microsoft Press in North America, and both Microsoft and O’Reilly will develop titles for Microsoft Press.
In another aspect of this partnership, O’Reilly is launching a new ebook initiative, an area where they are already active. Quoting their statement (emphasis added):
"There are more than 40 million people walking around the world with a mobile phone or digital device which essentially gives them a bookstore in their pocket. That's an enormous opportunity for publishers today," said Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly and an influential leader in the Open Source and Web 2.0 communities who has over one million Twitter followers. "We are no longer a print publisher that happens to sell digital books too. We're a digital publisher that also sells print books. All publishing is now digital publishing, and all writing is writing for the web. Books must behave like the web they're now a part of."
"We will apply the lessons we've learned and the knowledge we've gained about digital publishing," added O'Reilly. "And we will remain true to our own values. All the derivative content from each Microsoft Press title--whether it's an ebook, app, webcast or an interactive video--will be issued DRM-free, because that's what we believe in doing."
Their joint press release makes a good case for the strengths that each partner brings to the deal and I wish the partnership great success. I met Tim O’Reilly when he spoke at the Portland Area .NET User Group several years ago, and back then my conversation with him at the get together afterwards was about the challenges of an information age that is rooted in print and struggling to adapt to fickle forces of the digital, online world of consumers.
I am concerned about the decline of print media in general that we’ve been witnessing for a few years. As organizations like newspapers and publishers scale back their organizations, there will be types of activities, like maintaining foreign bureaus in the case of news industry, that fundamentally can’t be supported by smaller organizations. It takes an enormous amount of work to amass, assimilate, organize, and present a book’s worth of technical material. The publisher plays several crucial roles that allow that to occur. As publishers find tough challenges in the digital information age and a poor economy, it is the audience, we the readers, who stand to lose a lot if they don’t meet those challenges. I have read and heard Tim O’Reilly over many years, seen where he comes from, what he stands for, and what he makes happen in the professional community. I can’t think of a better person to get it right for the authors, the editors, the technology developers, and the reading public.
You can meet Tim yourself in the short collection of his writings titled, naturally enough, Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell.