[Catalyst] O’Reilly might yet be interested after all

[A. Pagaltzis]

Hi,

I just had the following exchange on reddit:

* a-p <http://programming.reddit.com/info/12u8e/comments/c12vm0>:
> There’s a book in the making. Unfortunately, O’Reilly won’t be
> the one publishing it. When the Catalyst devs approached them
> about a book, O’Reilly basically stated that they want only a
> single web framework in their lineup, and they’ve settled on
> Rails, and that’s that. Short-sighted if you ask me (and I’m
> not just saying that because of Catalyst, there’s also Django),
> but there ya go.

To which Tim O’Reilly replied:

* timoreilly <http://programming.reddit.com/info/12u8e/comments/c131n8>:
> I don’t know who was supposed to have made that statement, but
> it doesn’t make any sense to me. I’ll look into it.
> 
> That being said, I can imagine that an editor might have said
> that he or she thought that Rails had the ruby framework market
> wrapped up for now, and that there wasn’t room for a book on
> another framework till said framework had proved to have strong
> adoption. That’s a potentially legitimate market assessment –
> the computer book market is pretty brutal these days, and
> topics that once would have made for a successful book now
> don’t sell enough copies to recover their costs – but even
> then, that would be a “for now.”
> 
> A lot of publishers still throw stuff at the wall to see what
> sticks. We tend to publish books that we believe will succeed.
> And often, that means waiting till a new tool or framework has
> stood the test of time, and is at the right place on the
> adoption curve. It doesn’t do anyone – the author, readers,
> bookstores, or the publisher – to publish a book that doesn’t
> sell. Bookstores will give it a few months, and if it doesn’t
> do well, it will be returned, and that’s the end of that.
> Waiting a bit longer may actually increase your chances of
> success. It’s a bit like surfing. Paddling too early is as bad
> as paddling too late – you have to catch the wave.
> 
> O’Reilly has a history of publishing books before anyone else
> – we published the first commercial book on the internet,
> published about Perl in 1991, Linux in 1993 – but these
> technologies were actually not new when we published about
> them. They had proven themselves. They were just under the
> radar of other publishers.
> 
> As to publishing too early, Ruby itself is a good example. We
> published our first Ruby books way too early, they flopped, and
> then we took our eye off the ball.

Sounds good to me. I think where Perl is concerned, Catalyst has
definitely shown to be sticky, and it seems to me that it’s also
stable enough at this point that a book about it has hope of
being useful. (Book publishing is a slow process, and if the
thing’s still evolving rapidly, the book will be obsolete by the
time it’s on the shelves. Actually, I think a book about Catalyst
would have to be a book about DBIx::Class as well, partially
anyway, and that too is now at the point of having stabilised
enough.) Time is right, I think; the strong response to the
advent calendar is probably a good gauge for that.

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>