Wired 13.10: The Trend Spotter
Great profile of tech book publisher Tim O’Reilly.
"Yet O’Reilly himself has operated for years under the radar. Most nontechies, if they know him at all, know him by the eponymous name of his publishing -company. It has a 15 percent share of the $400 million -computer-book market but casts a much bigger shadow. O’Reilly books tend to colonize entire sections at Borders and Barnes & Noble, their distinctive cover design as recognizable as the Tide circle on a box of detergent or the Apple logo on the lid of a PowerBook. In serif type over a glossy white background, there is the title, often- naming a computer language or protocol familiar to codeheads and gibberish to everyone else (JavaServer Faces; Essential CVS; Using Samba, 2nd Edition). The illustrations are realistically rendered pen-and-ink drawings of animals."
