This is tough. I've known Tim for a long, long time and he's always been a stand-up guy with amazing ethics and vision. I also know Laurie and worked with her briefly when I was helping to co-author a long-forgotten O'Reilly book on Mozilla applications. She's a good editor.

I also tremendously respect Stephen Few's body of work and own all of his books. There is no doubt he's a leader in the field of information visualization.

What I think Stephen is missing here is a discussion about or the acknowledgement that the printed book industry is one of very low margins. It's entirely possible that the issues he is complaining about are a result of the O'Reilly print production managers choosing lower-quality sources and suppliers -- something O'Reilly doesn't have a history of. They pioneered the RepKover lay-flat binding, which costs a lot more than traditional binding. The cost of producing Stephen's book to the standards he expected was probably far too high for O'Reilly to have been able to make any profit on it at all without literally doubling the price. There is a reason that beautifully printed and produced architecture books, art history books and specialty books cost between $50 and $200 each.