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You make an excellent point that I fully agree with. Different companies have different target audiences and will therefore provide value in different ways. The value that O'Reilly can provide many other authors is likely not the kind that the OP needs given the amount of control he likes to maintain; and there's nothing wrong with that.

With that said though, it's very important that you fulfill your contractual obligations, which if I take the article at face value it appears O'Reilly did not (although I don't know their side of the story of course). If I enter into a contract filled with a long list of technical details, but include a clause that demands a bowl of M&Ms with all brown ones removed, then on pain of legal action there better be a bowl of M&Ms with all brown ones removed [1]. The author no doubt had specific reasons for his requests that he felt were important to the success of his book. During negotiations there is nothing requiring O'Reilly or any other company to give someone any special considerations. They could just as easily walk away. However once both parties sign a contract agreeing to the terms, both parties are legally required to provide what they agreed to. According to the post that did not happen in this case.

[1] http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp - According to David Lee Roth the reason for the M&M clause effectively boils down to he who doesn't pay attention to the small details probably won't pay attention to the truly important ones either; like making sure your arena floor can actually support the weight of the concert equipment (whoops).

Let me get this straight: the article says that O'Reilly maed no marketing effort so that's out. The rest you mention (layouting, uploading etc) is a one time effort. And yet, the publisher wants to keep the significant portion of profits ongoing. Is something wrong here? (Yes.)

Printing, warehousing, distribution, handling remainders, the privilege of having your book on O'Reilly's market website, coordinating distribution of updates to ebooks, etc. are not one-time efforts. All of this invisible stuff eats out of your percentage and out of O'Reilly's. In fact in traditional publishing schemes books rarely make a profit. Publishing is a hits-based industry even though the publisher appears to take so much from the author, precisely because everyone glosses over the long-term invisible costs.

The author is the one doing the one-time effort. After the author finishes, he turns it over to the publisher, who takes the one-time writing effort, adds to it editing, layout, graphics, printing, reprinting, inventory management, etc., creates a product out of a manuscript, then has their sales force sell that product on an ongoing basis from then on. While the publisher's work never ends, the author's ongoing task amounts to cashing royalty checks and complaining.

Or that's how publishers see it. Having said this, I should add that I'm both an author and a publisher, meaning I self-publish. I think traditional publishers take so outrageously much (in money and control) and deliver so ridiculously little that I'd never let them turn my writing into their product unless I were a celebrity.

Well said. Don't forget either that publishers have existing relationships with distributors, and that's definitely a foot in the door compared to having to find the wholesale contacts for each distributor you want to go with.

My mother ran a bookshop and was a small-time publisher, and few people outside the industry have even the faintest idea of the work involved in publishing (and distribution).

Not to say that there aren't scummy publishers out there, but the article author said he's already self-published once and had a good time of it - the only benefit he could reasonably get at that stage is the distribution and maybe marketing contacts. The benefit of a reasonable publisher for the author is a much smaller step than for someone who's never published.

You have to consider O'Reilly's niche. I'd imagine that there is a lot of overlap with the "entrepreneurial-minded HN crowd", which you just said should definitely self-publish. If the large bulk of O'Reilly's writers would be better off without them, what does that say about this arrangement specifically, not necessarily the publishing industry as a whole? What you've said probably has a lot of validity for novelists, but O'Reilly doesn't publish novels.

Is there a way for O'Reilly to reorient such that they provide real value at a reasonable price to their current niche, based on industry evolutions like the ability to self-publish ebooks, or does O'Reilly need to start courting the next J.K. Rowling?

You can still get a lot of value from what O'Reilly provides if you're in their niche. Imagine the CS professor writing a book on the latest hot language. He'll need an editor; how does a CS professor go about finding a trustworthy one? He'll need cover art; he'll need to know how to create ebooks (computers are a wide field and just because you're an expert in Dart doesn't mean you know how to create an epub file). You'd have to deal with printing your book and knowing all the lingo there. Typesetting, etc. Maybe you have amateur HTML knowledge; you could put together an epub, but would it look professional?

All of this is learnable. Does that mean everyone should do it themselves? Or that everyone has the time or inclination to do it themselves? No. Maybe the CS professor could learn it all, but they're too busy teaching classes or doing research. Or maybe the minutae of self-publishing doesn't interest them. Publishers like O'Reilly exchange part of your profit for bringing their domain knowledge to the table and doing it all for you. For this hypothetical CS professor, he's exactly in their target market, even though he could do it himself if he tried hard enough. So with that said, I don't really think the bulk of O'Reilly's (author) market is here on HN.

Right, I guess the question is, "for an authorship capable of self-publishing, is your deal fair enough?" Again, I can totally see how novelists are basically obliged to take the deals offered by the publishing groups, because they are most likely not going to be able to gather the required knowledge to self-publish in anything resembling a timely manner. But with O'Reilly's authors, a publishing house is a convenience, not a necessity, worthy of a fair price, not the total pwnage and incompetence typical in the field and recounted in this piece ("...I was paying for it dearly, allowing O’Reilly to retain all but a small fraction of net sales").

So again, if O'Reilly is going to treat their authors like helpless novelists who've typed out their manuscript on an old-school mechanical typewriter and have no chance of self-publishing without years of effort and training, why don't they just start publishing novels? Is there really a market for a classical publishing arrangement when your authorship is perfectly capable of self-publishing, but would just prefer not to do so?

Why would a novelist be less capable of self-publishing than technical authors? Do technical authors have bigger garages to keep their book stock in? Do they live closer to mail depots? Do they have better sales skills for negotiating with distributors?

Novelists are less likely to be technically inclined than people writing books on programming languages. I was careful to make this distinction in order to avoid this pedantry when I specified the class of novelist that still writes out manuscripts on a mechanical typewriter. Technically competent novelists may well be in the same predicament as O'Reillys' authors. I didn't say all novelists were technically incompetent. Please curb your outrage.

My dual point was that you look down on novelists as being archaic typewriter-users, and that there is a lot more to publishing than the technical aspects of layout or ebook formats. Please curb your prejudice.

Please read more carefully. Your "dual point" is meaningless noise. I didn't say all novelists were archaic typewriter users. The class of novelists that are not "helpless ... typewriter [users]" are not included in my statement which was specifically restricted to "helpless ... typewriter [users]". Novelists, however, are definitely more likely to be helpless typewriter users than the authorship of O'Reilly's publications, however. Please curb your outrage. It's trite pedantry.

You are still missing my main point: publishing is more than ebook conversion or maybe a bit of layout. Significantly more - and your painting of 'typewriter users' as being technically helpless, even if correct, does not bleed through to the other aspects of publishing. Please curb your prejudice.

Novelists, however, are definitely more likely to be helpless typewriter users than the authorship of O'Reilly's publications, however.

Yes, I agree - 0.1% is more likely than 0.0%, given that pretty much no-one uses typewriters these days, except perhaps the archaic stereotypical 'novelist' in your head. Take your accusations of pedantry elsewhere if you're going to make an argument based on an effectively non-existent demographic.

Edit: a significant part of what a publisher does, which you may not realise, it editing. Technical authors aren't better than any others when it comes to writing well (and the stereotype is that they're worse). Good editing has turned many a pig's ear into a silk purse.

As I mentioned, for those with the skill, time, patience, and determination, any traditional publishing deal, including O'Reilly, isn't worth it. But I think you're overestimating the amount of O'Reilly authors who can do (and are interested in doing, and have time for) every little thing required to produce, market, and distribute paper and ebooks.

Here on HN we're all hackers who like to roll up our sleeves; but O'Reilly's vast catalog isn't all written by hackers. I doubt even a majority is. O'Reilly doesn't need to start selling novels because their authors appear to be happy with the traditional tradeoff. If more weren't, then O'Reilly wouldn't exist today. After all self-publishing is nothing new. Vanity presses have been around for centuries.

Just like we'd chuckle at the guy who says, "You want how much to make a web site? Don't you just put a picture at the top and write some text?" so too would O'Reilly chuckle at us for saying, "They want how much for their percentage? Don't they just turn on a printer and convert a .doc file to .mobi with Calibre?"

Here on HN we're all hackers who like to roll up our sleeves

I think you're very right about this, but there's even more to it. When O'Reilly started, getting a book published was like getting a chip design fabricated. You had professionals who worked with software that cost thousands of dollars producing "camera ready" pages for printers, whose enormously expensive equipment required very special formats. And the end product had to go through a channel as a physical product being moved to tens of thousands of bookstores, because those incredibly fragmented physical sales locations were almost the only places books were sold.

It just didn't matter how much of a "roll up your sleeves" guy you were in that world (which I remember like it was yesterday.)

But that world is gone. These days, you can create your book entirely with free software as you sit on a beach, and you can sell it in electronic form off your own website to the entire planet (without leaving the beach.) You can do all the marketing, all the selling, collect your paychecks, and use them to buy stuff, all from that little spot in the sand.

O'Reilly is still needed by some, but for "roll up your sleeves hackers", I think their time has past.

All the things you list, marketing, formatting, etc, you would have to pay yourself out of pocket if you couldn't do it yourself. I hired a designer for my book and it cost me roughly $1500. I haven't paid for marketing yet but at least if I released the book myself, I would have that option, and it would be worth it to me because I would be taking in the bulk of the income instead of a publisher. The saddest part about this article is that his publisher seemingly did NOTHING to promote his book. That would be the main reason I would go with a publisher at all.