Tim O'Reilly interview - O'Reilly on books (part 3)

 

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By Alun Williams

Posted on 15 Jul 2003 at 10:55

O'Reilly & Associates is celebrating its 25th birthday this year. To mark the event - and coinciding with a visit of Tim O'Reilly to London - we put the important questions to him regarding the battle between IBM and SCO, the fate of Linux, his involvement in the world of open source, and his love of science fiction...

Tim O'Reilly interview - O'Reilly on Linux (part 1)
Tim O'Reilly interview - O'Reilly on Java and the Internet (part 2)
Tim O'Reilly interview - O'Reilly on books (part 3)

You are best known as the founder of O'Reilly books, is there a particular title of which you are most proud, or which has been of most significance to the company?

O'Reilly: There are many through the years, moving as technology has evolved. In our early years, I was most proud of my own book Managing UUCP and Usenet (1986), and its role in helping the early Usenet make the transition from cooperative user network to a commercial network. Then The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog (1992) was the book that brought the Internet to the masses. (I remember folks saying we should have gotten a Pulitzer prize for that book. It was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the most significant books of the 20th century, so I guess that's recognition enough!)

And of course, our Xlib Programming Manual (1988), Programming Perl (1991) and Running Linux (1993) were instrumental in helping to validate key open-source technologies. And of course, they were also the books that got us consciously involved in the open-source phenomenon.

I'm also very proud of Java in a Nutshell (1995). This was the key book from which many people learned Java, which remains one of the most significant computing breakthroughs of the last decades. Sun's prescience in understanding that we were moving to network computing really should be appreciated. Java may not have gotten everything right, but its creators saw the future more clearly than just about anyone else. And we've all been reworking that vision for the past eight years.

More recently, I'm proudest of Google Hacks (2003) for proving that we can continue to surf the wavefront of innovation, and find things that other publishers miss that really are the shape of the future. Of course, the fact that we played a small role in actually getting the technology to happen made this one especially sweet.

I'm also pretty darn proud of Mac OS X: The Missing Manual. We saw that Mac OS X was a breakthrough for Apple, and jumped on the opportunity when everyone else had written them off. The book has been our biggest bestseller since The Whole Internet User's Guide.

Overall, what I'm proudest of is that O'Reilly has managed to stay relevant, to find technologies that matter, and to help them 'cross the chasm' from the technical community to a wider community of users.

You are celebrating the 25th anniversary of O'Reilly books, and congratulations for that. But what does the next 25 years hold for the company? You have already branched out from technical works to healthcare and travel writing, haven't you...

O'Reilly: Well, we're not actually celebrating 25 years of O'Reilly books, but of the company O'Reilly & Associates. We started out as a documentation consulting company in 1978, and didn't publish our first books till 1985. But that's a bit of a nit.