It seems like O'Reilly has finally succumbed to the trend for thick books. The latest offering, Paul DuBois' MySQL Cookbook weighs in at 1022 pages. The first think O'Reilly book I remember was the 2nd edition of Programming Python (1256 pages), shortly followed by the 3rd edition of Programming Perl.
I'm not complaining. There's a lot to say about each of these topics. Part of me wishes we could go back to the days when a major technical work would be released in a series of volumes with copious cross references. (The X and UNIX manuals come to mind.) It helped to just know you wanted to pick up Programming Perl, Volume 3: Regular Expressions, open to some page or another, next to Programming Perl, Volume 2: Builtin Functions open as always to the page on localtime.
Sadly, those days are gone and unlikely to return. The major multi-volume reference works that I remember were produced by the technical writing department at companies like AT&T, Sun, DEC and the like. (Yes, O'Reilly belongs in that list, but I'm not sure who actually wrote the X manuals.)
Then again, O'Reilly is living in an industry where competitors are using all sorts of dirty tricks to get books with wide spines to the market: thick paper, wide margins, large type, and long stretches of text (or code) that say nothing. At least O'Reilly is delivering the same kind of material the old multi-volume libraries used to deliver, while their competitors play games.
Re:And then...
ziggy on 2002-11-02T04:30:02
But would you buy PPerl3 if it were sold as a three-volume set, so that you can keep one volume at a time with you in your backpack?And then you get people like me who won't buy the fat books because they're too damned heavy. I'm not buying camel3 for that reason. Ditto ESA. And a few others.Re:And then...
koschei on 2002-11-02T04:35:23
Absolutely. Although I'm not sure I actually want a copy anyway =)
Even a two volume set of Camel3 would be fine (not having a paper copy handy I'm not sure exactly where it can split well =) ).
Re:Thick paper
koschei on 2002-11-02T04:03:50
Maybe we should lobby some of the worse publishers to print their books on toilet paper.
Looking at several recent books, Perl & XML, Learning Cocoa, Perl & LWP, and Mac OS X for Unix Geeks are reasonably small. Dynamic HTML is huge, though. I think you're noticing that cookbooks and definitive guides are big. Normal books tend to stay in the 250-400 page range.
Re:Book Sizes
gav on 2002-11-02T04:11:05
Dynamic HTML is a scary 1418 pages. I almost put my back out picking it up. It's also so big, bulky, and overwhelming that I haven't read a single page.Re:Book Sizes
ziggy on 2002-11-02T04:26:27
Yes. O'Reilly titles aren't uniformly huge. While some of the denser titles are thick, there are a few that are just barely 200 pages. (The first edition of the Polar Bear book was around 200 pages; the 2nd edition is just under 500 pages.)I've always found that the optimal length for a technical book to hover around 300 pages (of reasonable thickness). That also supports what I said about taking a 1400 page tome and chunking it into 4-5 topical volumes...
Just another $0.02
Translation: I just bought a thick O'Reilly book. We've always done thick and thin books. The editorial motto is "write as much as needs to be said, no more and no less". If there's 1200 pages in a MySQL Cookbook, it's because we couldn't fit it into 1199, not because the first draft stopped at 500 and we forced the author to pad.
"a series of volumes"
You're right that those days aren't likely to return. The prevailing wisdom is that if you release two volumes, sales of Volume 2 will be lower than Volume 1. If you release three volumes
I wrote a program to analyze the page counts of the books on the new releases list. The average count is 427. If you take out the second and third editions (which are always longer than firsts) you get 392. Either way, 400 pages is hardly huge. That's less than the first edition of "Programming Perl".
Yes, you can point to some books with high page counts. But you're not pointing to all the pocket references, pocket guides, small animals, and 250-300 page (Perl & LWP, for example) books that we've done.
--Nat
Re: thick books
jordan on 2002-11-07T18:05:18
I'm no O'Reilly historian, but I believe the first O'Reilly books were a series on the X-Windows System. An office where I once worked had the complete set. Each book was fairly thick. Each book covered one subject as completely as possible, spilling over into multiple volumes where necessary.Re: thick books
ziggy on 2002-11-07T20:23:43
O'Reilly and associates started their publishing business based on the sales from those X manuals.As gnat pointed out, the problem with multi-volume sets is that some volumes sell more than others. I believe that it's a lot easier to find volumes 3 and 3M (Motif) than many of the other volumes. I think they were the biggest sellers in the series. I don't know how often I've seen the full set (with the Motif volumes included), but in my experience it's a rare site to see.
Re: thick books
jordan on 2002-11-07T20:50:21
I was agreeing with Gnat. Some of those X manuals were quite thick.
I think O'Reilly has not changed it's policies with regard to manual thickness. They make them thick enough to cover the subject as completely as possible.
Re: thick books
ethan on 2002-11-07T18:38:04
You're right that those days aren't likely to return. The prevailing wisdom is that if you release two volumes, sales of Volume 2 will be lower than Volume 1.
Also, I vaguely suspect that two volumes would cost a little more. Of course, this is hardly a matter with O'Reilly books. The benefits I got from my three O'Reillys (Debian, Linux in a nutshelf and the Camel) far outweight the money I paid for them.
Anyway, there is nothing at all wring with thick books! I wish the Camel had 5000 pages instead of just a little over 1000. It's educational and very entertaining. Who would not want to read more of that kind? Hmmh, any yet plans to publish the Perl Encyclopaedia? Would look splendid in my bookshelf (bearing golden edges, similar to those of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a must of course;-). Re: thick books
Theory on 2002-11-07T20:38:53
I just got my copy of the new Mason book, and was wondering, what happened to the RepKover? Surely the Mason book is slender enough that it could have used one, no?
--David
Re: thick books
gnat on 2002-11-08T20:30:05
Two things: (1) it was expensive, and we've had to pinch the pennies where we can; and (2) we had complaints about pages falling out and other miserableness. As far as I know, we're sticking with perfect binding.--Nat
Re: thick books
hfb on 2002-11-07T20:39:13
It's a pity I packed it into boxes already but I do have a copy of the original "Make" book by Andy and Tim which, if I recall correctly, was ~200 pages, roughly 6x8" in size and had punches for a 3-ring binder. Is anyone at ORA still planning on doing a little timeline style history of the books over the last 15 years? But, one must admit, compared to ORA books ca. 1994 when the Sendmail book was leviathan, they have increased in page count which could mean there is more to write about or the topics have taken on a broader scope. One can always hope that it is content rather than length that spurs people to make a purchase.Re: thick books
gnat on 2002-11-08T20:33:27
It's our 25th anniversary next year. Expect a lot of cool things, including a shindig at OSCON. I imagine a timeline history will be part of this.--Nat
Re: thick books
ziggy on 2002-11-07T20:57:17
Not exactly.Translation: I just bought a thick O'Reilly book.A while ago, I was approached to write a book about SOAP. I'm not exactly interested in the topic, but I've a fair share of presentations about it, and written an article or two about it. The publisher who approached me out of the blue started the conversation by talking about the process of writing a book for them: make sure that it's at least 300 pages at a bare minimum, because the book won't sell unless the spine is at least 4 inches thick. Oh, and then the other tricks can come into play to beef up the thickness: thicker paper, large fonts, wide margins, etc.
Of course, I never pursued the idea any further. If I'm going to write a book, it'll (1) be about a topic I care about and like, and (2) be short enough to be interesting and long enough to cover the topic.
Ever since then, I look at the shelves at Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Reiter's a little differently. That publisher focused on the cutthroat nature of publishing, and how thick books have a better chance of being seen, and thick books crowd out a shelf full of thinner titles.
With O'Reilly, I trust that's what's happening. I'm less inclined to believe that O'Reilly is padding or stuffing the titles like other publishers have frequently and consistently done in the past. But with the economics of publishing changing over time, I'm starting to wonder if there's something intrinsically different today than ten years ago.If there's 1200 pages in a MySQL Cookbook, it's because we couldn't fit it into 1199, not because the first draft stopped at 500 and we forced the author to pad.Taking a cynical perspective, it looks like O'Reilly needs to compete more effectively with other less scrupulous publishers. Perhaps that is changing the editorial selection process to find more titles that need 1200 page treatments (and casting the net wide enough so that 1200 pages is about right).
I'm certainly not saying that's the only explanation though. I'm perfectly willing to believe that the economics of publishing a thick book are better now than they were 5-10 years ago, so 1200 page titles that would have been trimmed down or rejected in the past are now being greenlighted. Or, more optimistically, there's a metric buttload more stuff to say about open source now than there was five years ago.
Re: thick books
barbie on 2002-11-07T21:26:17
Unfortunately the dirty tricks don't just apply to technical books. Having bought many second-hand sci-fi books from the 60s/70s, which neatly fitted into your pocket, the same books are now being republished at least a third bigger in all dimensions, mainly due to the type being twice the size and with bigger gaps between the lines.While ORA and others do produce good quality books in my opinion, there are some (one based not too far away from where I'm currently sitting) that do feel they have to resort to such tactics. If only people would vote more with their wallet.
In the case of the MySQL Cookbook, although I haven't read it, I hope there are many good and worthwhile examples that it contains. And if it takes 1200 to get across good quality content then so be it.
Re: thick books
trachtenberga on 2002-11-08T05:02:01
As a co-author of an upcoming O'Reilly Cookbook -- PHP Cookbook -- I can assure you that there was no pressure from the O'Reilly staff for our book to be any length other than what we felt was the correct one.In fact, we cut material from the book towards the end because we didn't think it was of the same quality as the rest.
Also, the Cookbook format lends itself to longer books because of the Question / Solution / Discussion division. We could make it more compact, but it'd be harder to skim and it'd take you longer to find what you want -- it's a trade-off.
Last, the new O'Reilly design and format actually makes shorter books than the old one. I don't know if this is on purpose, but it'd be easy to keep it the same -- if not lengthen it -- so I guarantee they're not looking to produce long books for the sake of length.
Re: thick books
ziggy on 2002-11-08T16:52:17
I never said that there was any pressure to fill pages, or water down the quality of a title to fill a length requirement.I can assure you that there was no pressure from the O'Reilly staff for our book to be any length other than what we felt was the correct one.This is exactly my point. The cookbook format at O'Reilly is about 5 years old. At the time, the Perl Cookbook was one of O'Reilly's thickest titles. Ten years ago, O'Reilly titles that were 800-1000+ pages were very rare.Also, the Cookbook format lends itself to longer books because of the Question / Solution / Discussion division.I'm not accusing O'Reilly or its authors of any wrongdoing, immoral conduct or anti-tree behavior. I'm just noticing that O'Reilly titles have been getting thicker on the far end of the bell curve for the last few years. The cookbook format may be part of the explanation for this observation. The nature of the publishing industry may (or may not) be part of the explanation.
Personally, I'd like to see a return to the days of multi-volume reference books instead of thousand page tomes. But they are as likely to return as the Edsel.
Re: thick books
gnat on 2002-11-08T21:04:03
Hi Adam!:-) Yes, you're right--the interior design was changed to fit more on a page. Headings take less space, we can get more columns of code in our examples, and we get more words per page overall than before. All contribute to a lower page count.
--Nat
Re: thick books
gnat on 2002-11-08T20:58:02
the book won't sell unless the spine is at least 4 inches thickHo ho. The one piece of feedback we consistently hear about our books is that people like small ones. We editors love small books. They're quicker to do, easier to edit, and faster to get through production. The 1200+ page monstrosities are clusterfucks for everyone. Some books need those 1200 pages, though--good luck writing The Definitive Sendmail Book in 250 pages.
it looks like O'Reilly needs to compete more effectively with other less scrupulous publishers
And we're doing that by publishing the Nice Small Book on topics (where possible). Sometimes we can't avoid a 500 page book but most of our 500 page books would be 1200 page books by anyone else.
--Nat
Re: thick books
gnat on 2002-11-08T21:00:09
One extra paragraph of italic at no extra cost!Bah. I was distracted by the arrival of "Computer Science & Perl Programming". Whee!
--Nat
