BurningbirdLong ago, I begged Aquarionics, otherwise known as the sexiest voice in weblogging to record my Mockingbird’s Wish.
Well, I’m happy to say that he’s started, and has already posted outtakes from his first efforts, which are exceedingly entertaining. And a very nice and welcome surprise for me today.
When the bottom fell out of the dot-com a few years back, software consulting and internet companies weren’t the only industries impacted: computer technology book publishers, who enjoyed a huge surge of business at the height of the dot-com era, also suffered, sometimes drastically, when the good times stopped rolling.
It wasn’t uncommon to hear of this computer tech publisher or that one closing down, declaring bankruptcy, or being absorbed into a more mixed-genre publisher. Two I worked with in the past closed their doors within a year of each other: Corolis and Wrox. The Wrox company name was absorbed by Wiley, and much of the intellectual property was absorbed by Apress.
(The publishing companies weren’t the only ones hit–just ask the writers and others who contract with book companies. Being a technology architect, especially for Internet-enabled applications, and a computer book writer, I felt like I was getting it from both sides. I watched my 6-digit income compress until I was lucky if 4 digits survived.)
For the companies that did manage to survive, many had to look at new ways of doing business. Production and distribution costs for a publisher can be a heavy burden, and to support these the companies need to have enough books flowing through the distribution pipeline to make a profit. If existing markets aren’t generating enough flow, time to innovate.
One company that has survived is O’Reilly, and I believe it’s based on decisions that have expanded the company in three directions.
The first is the O’Reilly conferences. I’ve been to one O’Reilly conference as a speaker, and though they are expensive, they’re also first class. First class hotel, first class presentation rooms, innovative use of breakfasts and lunches to foster new connections, and excellent multimedia management within each of the rooms. Additionally, the company has kept it’s ear on what’s hot and focused the conferences accordingly (not to mention getting excellent speakers…ahem).
However, I imagine the company only breaks even on conferences, with costs eating up most, if not all of the profits. What the conferences do bring is a connection between the company and the technology–essential for a computer book company.
With each conference, O’Reilly is ‘marking it’s territory’–building identification as the computer book company. This is risky, because conferences that don’t do well can set a company back a significant amount of money. However, I think the payoff is worth it. Other than the fact that we can’t seem to get O’Reilly to have a conference in St. Louis, it seems to be working.
A second direction the company has taken, from what I can see, is to partner with other book vendors to share costs: distribution, production, and even the online book access at the Safari Bookshelf. Again, this is a move that’s not without risk. After all, more books published on a subject mean more books competing on that subject, and that can impact on book sales. Additionally, less people buying books can mean more books are going through the production pipeline without ending in sales.
Still, I think it’s another good idea, though I have no idea if it’s proving profitable or not. Each company has its own brand of books, and therefore it’s own particular audience, and that’s not going to change based on sharing production costs or publicity or distribution. At least, that’s my take, but I’m not an expert.
But after authoring 15 computer books, I am an expert on the final direction that O’Reilly is taking and that is expanding the book brands the company is carrying. By book brands, I’m talking specifically about series of books with same relative audience, similar styles, and usually with an overall shared look and feel. Think O’Reilly animal books and you’ll know what I mean.
This is an incredibly risky move, but with some enormous potential for revenue. With a new brand, you can reach out for new, untapped audiences, and with a lot of your previous audience now delivering pizza, you need fresh buyers. However, if the brand isn’t marketed just right, or seems confusing to potential buyers, or the audience doesn’t appear, you could have a lot of good writing, a lot of advances paid to writers, and a large investment in production and marketing heading down the drain. Unlike a single book, a brand that fails to succeed can be the proverbial 2 x 4 to face for the publisher.
O’Reilly’s development of new brands is the direction that, being a writer, interests me the most–and not because I’m always on the lookup for a new book opportunity. It does so because I can watch the trends in book brands and get a fairly good idea how book audiences are changing, and then adjust whatever I’m working on accordingly.
Does this sound dishonest? To change my writing to fit the market? You must remember that computer book writers are not writing the great American novel. When I write a book on the Internet or RDF, I am not James Agee or Walker Evans defending my epic novel Let Us Now Praise Famous Men from the depredations of a publishing company geared to fixed production costs.
No matter how well written the book is, and I hope mine are reasonably well written (and my editors find my famous Bb typos, so that’s covered, thankfully), no computer book will stand the test of time; no, not even Kernighan’s and Ritchie’s The C Programming Language book.
We have an obligation to cover the material thoroughly and accurately for our audience, but we are free to redefine that audience as need demands. All these books have a limited shelf life, and after all, we have to eat; we have habits like travel and photography and weblogging to support; we have cats that demand crunchies as treats at noon.
Simon St. Laurent has been sending me copies of several different O’Reilly brands primarily to help me generate some ideas for future books. Among them was a traditional animal book (RELAX NG); the Mac OS Missing Manual for Panther from the Missing Manual series; three books from the Pocket series, including Digital Photography; Google Hacks and eBay Hacks from the Hacks books; the highly innovative Head First series books Head First Java and Head First EJB; and two books from O’Reilly’s new directions into the digital photography interest field: Adobe Photoshop CS,and from what looks like a new brand, O’Reilly Digital Studio the book, Digital Photography: Expert Techniques.
That’s a lot of books, and a lot of brands, especially considering that each really is targeted to a completely different audience. So for the next few days, I’m going to cover each brand in a separate essay, including my impressions of the brand, reviews of the books, and finally the answer to my own question: could I write a book in this particular series?
As a disclaimer, note that I’m going to attempt to write about these books honestly, objectively, even critically, while still keeping in the back of my mind that I want to write for O’Reilly in the future.
And for my next trick, I’ll attempt to pull a Republican out of San Francisco.
For someone who has mainly read the O’Reilly animal books, Adobe Photoshop CS and Digital Photography: Expert Techniques have been a completely different experience.
Both books are beautifully produced, rich with graphics and using the glossier paper that is typical with highly graphic publications. However, like the animal books, both are rich in detail with lots of examples and tutorials.
The Adobe Photoshop CS: One on One book is by a well known Adobe trainer, Deke McClelland, and includes a 2-hour tutorial on CD. As you step through the video you can follow along with the examples (also loaded on the CD), as you learn all the ins and outs of Adobe Photoshop. Though the book is focused on the newest Photoshop, CS (version 8.0), I found that most of the examples worked equally well with my Photoshop 5.0 on Windows and Photoshop 6.0 on the Mac.
I really liked the comfortable writing style, and the fact that the author embeds his own opinions into the text. That’s important – you don’t want someone to just tell you how to use Unsharp; you want someone who will tell you why you would want to use Unsharp over the other Sharp filters (even though he will also demonstrate these, too).
Photo correction is a major component of the tutorial, but much of it is focused on some pretty extensive photo retouching, in addition to building rich graphics for publication. This book will be particularly good for someone who wants to learn some nifty new tricks with Photoshop–including good examples working with the layers, which I don’t use probably as much as I should. However, I did use the book to help me tweak the production quality of some images I was trying to print out (to inkjet).
The images in the book are wonderful, and the production quality is above average. This is not a cheap book. If I have one problem with it, it’s that each chapter has an introduction and summary section associated with it. You know what I’m talking about: “Here’s what you’ll learn…” and “Here’s what you learned” with questions and answers. I’m not a kid, I don’t need this type of assistance. However, this is only a couple of pages in each chapter, and easily ignored. So ignore it, unless you like that sort of thing.
Good book, could definitely recommend for all beginning to beginning/intermediate Photoshop users.
The next book, Digital Photography: Expert Techniques had a little more appeal for me primarily because I don’t necessarily use all the nifty tricks of Photoshop, but I would like to improve my use of the digital camera.
This is an unsual book. As with the Photoshop book, it’s full of beautiful images, but the focus of the book is how to set up and take the best image directly, rather than using Photoshop later to try and recover the image. And it covers everything, including the equipment you’ll need, why, and basic photography how-tos and information such as focal lengths and the use of gray cards for accurate color balancing.
Once you have your image, the book then gets into basic digital photo manipulation and correction, but with an assumption that you have had some exposure to Photoshop. The reason for this is that the two books are meant to complement not compete with each other.
Digital Photography has chapters such as “Retouching and Rescuing Photos”, “Sell it on the Web” (which includes some good advice on creating portfolios and how to make animated images), “Bringing out the Best Picture”, and so on. It also has a chapter called “Creating Fictitious Photos”. For the photo purists out there, “Creating Fictitous Photos” will drive you crazy. The chapter focuses on how to create images by merging multiple images, or removing entire objects–even how to create a collage! This is a twisty chapter; if you like to play around with your images, you’re going to like this chapter.
All in all, if you’re not experienced with photography and have or are planning on buying a digital camera, and then investing in either Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, this book would be a very good use of your money and time. Even if you’re fairly experienced with photography, there are some interesting tricks in the book that should make this is a good buy.
I think that O’Reilly’s going to do well with these new brands. I believe that digital photography is going to open photography up to a whole new audience, and the members all going to want to know how to do great photos. The book packaging– covers, graphics, and the production quality– are perfect for selling the books.
(Once you convince people that O’Reilly books aren’t just for geeks, anymore. )
Now, would I write for either of these series? Not a chance.
I am in the midst of taking my photos in a new direction, and taking a lot of my work back to ground zero. Writing for a book like these is best left to those people who have had their ground zero moments. Additionally, I’m not a heavy hitter with Photoshop, having just started mastering Unsharp. So it would make no sense for me to work on this series, I couldn’t do the books justice.
They sure are pretty books though. I wonder if I can convince O’Reilly to do a second edition of Practical RDF, but using photographs? I can demonstrate an RDF Photography Finder.
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
I recently finished a wonderful biography on Walker Evans: Walker Evans: A Biography by Belinda Rathbone. Some critics have said that the book reads a little too matter of fact to be interesting, but that’s a perfect type of biography for a man like Walker Evans–an objective biography for an objective man.
In the book I discovered that Evans was born in St. Louis, though he didn’t live here long, moving to Chicago, and eventually ending up in New York. He came from a dysfunctional family, was himself married twice, had numerous affairs, almost always with married women, and preferred rooms decorated in black, white, and gray. Additionally, I found out that he was not a particularly good student, kept flunking Latin, and always saw himself as a writer. Even after his photographic career was established, he saw himself as a writer, an interesting fact which I’ll get into in more detail in a later essay.
From the start, Evans rejected much of the contemporary style of photography that was prevalent in his time (and to some extent, still in vogue today). One style of photography popular with art photographers at the time was called pictorialism and rather than utilizing the power of the camera to capture images as is, featured created images that were contrived rather than found. You still see these types of photos today when a woman or man is posed holding an apple, looking pensively off into shadows, staged next to a carefully undecorated and plain white wall.
The second style popular at that time was modernistic photography, subjects of which are best described by a quote from M. F. Agha, art director of Conde Nast:
Eggs (any style). Twenty shoes, standing in a row. A skyscaper , taken from a modernist angle. Ten tea cups standing in a row. A factory chimney seen through the ironwork of a railroad bridge (modernistic angle). The eye of a fly enlarged 2000 times. The eye of an elephant (same size). The interior of a watch. Three different heads of one lady superimposed. The interior of a garbage can. More eggs…
One can see why Evans rejected both pictorialism and the modernistic photographic styles, but he drifted about for a time, trying to establish what type of photography he wanted to do.
It was after seeing a photograph by Paul Strand, of a blind woman with a hand lettered sign reading “Blind” hung around her neck that served as Evan’s inspiration. As Rathbone wrote:
The picture implied an encroaching crisis of the American dream of prosperity, but it showed no obvious emotion. The fact that the photographer had stolen his photograph was pointedly expressed by the stark sign hanging around the woman’s neck, as if the subject had come with her own caption. Was the portrait cruel or sympathetic? It was the fact that it was neither, that it appeared not to reveal the photographer’s feelings at all, that intrigued Evans.
…that it appeared not to reveal the photographer’s feeling at all. If there is any key to Evans, it is contained in that one sentence. In all of his photos, not once does he impose his view, his thoughts and feelings, between the subject and the audience. He disdained photos that deliberately attempted to manipulate the viewers emotions; particularly those that used sentiment, which he considered contrived.
The distinguishing component of all Evans’ work, was his objectivity.
But Evans wasn’t just known for his objectivity and his excellent eye for an image — he was also known, or should I say, not known for his grasp of the mechanics of photography. He would ruin several images by his somewhat haphazard lab skills, and lose other images because of under or over exposure. It was not through knowing the mechanics of photography that Evans achieved his work; it was through his exceptional ability to see an extraordinary image from every day things; and then to patiently stalk that image, returning day after day, if needed, to capture it on film. He would never change the scene, or add or subtract elements from it. This, to him, would be completely dishonest. The most he would do would wait for a different light, or if he were taking photographs of people, wait until they were either unaware of the camera, or had relaxed from being in front of the camera.
Needless to say, Evans was almost always late in delivering on his assignments, and drove more than one person to distraction by his exacting nature. Lucky for us, he was not a conciliatory person.
In fact, one of my favorite Evans photograph (another one I can’t locate to reproduce here) was a somewhat blurry photo of Evans’ second wife, Isabelle Boeschenstein, wearing evening dress, hair in her face, lighting a cigarette at what looks to be some kind of gathering. It was not the photographic quality of the image that caught my eye; it was how much information about the woman was captured in that one simple photo. It is astonishing.
Evans did not rely on photographic tricks to make his images, and rarely did more in the darkroom then crop shots. But he was obsessed with how they were presented at shows, usually asking to hang his works himself, with no one else present. For the first edition of Now Let Us Praise Famous Men he was determined that the images for the book be perfect, and worked almost daily with the engraver to make minor adjustments to correct an engraving until it reflected the image he had of it in his mind. From Rathbone:
The wrinkles on the Burroughses’ bedsheets did not show up clearly enough; could he make them sharper? Could he show more clearly the tear in the pillowcase? Could he bring out the texture of the wooden wall and the objects around the fireplace? Could he soften the lines on Allie Mae’s face, sharpen the creases on Bud Fields’ overalls? Under Evans’ scrupulous direction, several of the plates had to be made over again entirely, while small imperfections in others were painstakingly corrected.
The engraver was too helpful at one point, and removed dead bugs from a photo of a bed, and Evans refused to allow the image be used as it was, and the fleas had to be added back in.
This reminds me of earlier discussions about the purists view of photography. Despite the care taken with the engravings for the book, Evans did very little with the actual images himself. Because of this, and his belief in photographs reflecting the image as taken–the true image–we would consider Evans a purist. I’m not sure what he would make of today’s digital cameras and Photoshop, though I have a feeling he would like the camera. So much easier to take those unexpected, hidden photos.
Earlier I published a link to a baby squirrel image that had been rescued from a mediocre photograph through the use of Photoshop. I have no doubts that this is not something that Evans would do.
No, if Walker Evans wanted a photo of a baby squirrel, it would be because he discovered the baby squirrel by accident one day and was struck by the image for some reason*. He would then get someone to hire him to take photographs of Native American wildlife, and would use the money to purchase new camera requirement, and probably to take other images in the neighborhood–the broken fence, the lost cat notices on the telephone poles, the old woman buying tomatoes at the market. He would then set up his camera by the baby squirrel’s hole, and if the baby didn’t oblige with the proper image one day, he would return the next. If a week goes by without the image, and by then the squirrel was too old, Evans would return the next year, much to the consternation of his employer (who he would still charm, even while irritating).
But by the time he was done, you’d have a rich, fascinating image of a squirrel, sitting in a hole of a tree, the grain of which would stand out in the image, almost as if the image was three-dimensional. The light wouldn’t be the proper light, it would be the perfect light, and the squirrel wouldn’t be enticed to pose–it would be acting as a baby squirrel acts, normally.
And it wouldn’t be a photo of an adorable baby squirrel, eliciting cries of, “How cute!” It would be a photo of a rodent.
*I doubt Evans would be interested in a photo of a baby squirrel.
Who says you can’t have fun with RDF? Not the creators of this online game that’s who.
The witches look at your naked body and titter. Then they see your bar of soap and take it away, muttering about scented baths and candles
(Thanks to Peter Van Dijick)