The O'Reilly brand is the "good enough" brand. I don't expect to be up at night reading an O'Reilly book in my bed, but I do expect to be up at 7pm referencing an O'Reilly book's index at my desk.
Also, I like the animal pictures. :3
Yes. I doubt there is another way.
Do you know how tech book publishing works? It's not fiction publishing -- publishers aren't deluged with a large pool of manuscripts from which they can pick out the best ones. The financial incentives are very poor: Unless they target a very broad audience (see: David Pogue) tech book authors don't make enough royalty money to reimburse them for their time. So publishers must approach potential authors in advance, woo them, and sign them to book-publishing contracts before the books are written. Since they can't offer enough money, the publishers must approach people who have other incentives -- e.g. existing experts or inventors who want to promote themselves or their tools. Unfortunately, the skills required to become an expert in something like XML are not necessarily correlated with the skills required to write a good book about it. And, of course, it can be hard to identify an expert in advance. And it's often better to hire a lesser writer, or a lesser expert, than to have no book on a particular topic in your product line.
Once a book is delivered (if the book is delivered -- a lot of authors burn out in the process), the publisher can work with the author to edit it, but the option of rejecting the manuscript is probably difficult and expensive and politically nasty. So, once written, I suspect that a tech book tends to be published. Might as well let the reviewers and the public do the dirty work of deciding that it's bad. Particularly since there are many subspecialties where a badly-written book is far better than no book at all.
The O'Reilly websites are actually useful (and free), contrary to what other publishers have to offer. He has an interesting blog. He is able to pay other bloggers for their work. He's experimenting with different formats and revenue models (Safari bookshelf) to make interesting content available.
Trying new things and making a living off them is awesome. That's why I like to hear his opinion on these matters.
These days whenever I'm tempted to buy an O'Reilly book that I don't immediately need, I think about the stack I already have that I never read anymore and then check the discount. In the past two years I haven't bought any book of theirs not discounted by at least 50%.
XML anything is incomprehensible. Garbage in, garbage out.