Tim O'Reilly on Computer Books

Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly publishing answered questions on the economics of writing on computer topics. I found this excerpt interesting:

"Your choice of publisher helps [a book be successful]. The clearest lesson from Bookscan (to refer to the data that started this thread) is that the market is consolidating. Fully 80 percent of the market shown by Bookscan (about 65-70 percent of U.S. domestic retail sales, including online accounts) is owned by Pearson, Wiley, O'Reilly, and Microsoft Press, in that order. If you add Osborne and Sybex, you get to 90 percent. (Pearson is a conglomerate owning many individual imprints--AW, PH, Peachpit, Sams, New Riders, Brady, Cisco Press, Adobe Press, Macromedia Press, etc.--so the market looks more diverse than it actually is.) Having been a small publisher who worked my way up over many years, I won't say it [success of a book sold by a small publisher] can't be done. But I think it's a lot harder than it was in the '80s and '90s. In short, being part of an established series at an established publishing house is, unfortunately, very important."

I'm glad my publisher is Pearson's Addison-Wesley!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeek in Action Videos

Image
This is a quick note to point blog readers to my Zeek in Action YouTube video series for the Zeek network security monitoring project .  Each video addresses a topic that I think might be of interest to people trying to understand their network using Zeek and adjacent tools and approaches, like Suricata, Wireshark, and so on.  I am especially pleased with Video 6 on monitoring wireless networks . It took me several weeks to research material for this video. I had to buy new hardware and experiment with a Linux distro that I had not used before -- Parrot .  Please like and subscribe, and let me know if there is a topic you think might make a good video.
Read more

New Book! The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4

Image
  I've completed the TaoSecurity Blog book series . The new book is  The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4: Beyond the Blog with Articles, Testimony, and Scholarship .  It's available now for Kindle , and I'm working on the print edition.  I'm running a 50% off promo on Volumes 1-3 on Kindle through midnight 20 April. Take advantage before the prices go back up. I described the new title thus: Go beyond TaoSecurity Blog with this new volume from author Richard Bejtlich. In the first three volumes of the series, Mr. Bejtlich selected and republished the very best entries from 18 years of writing and over 18 million blog views, along with commentaries and additional material.  In this title, Mr. Bejtlich collects material that has not been published elsewhere, including articles that are no longer available or are stored in assorted digital or physical archives. Volume 4 offers early white papers that Mr. Bejtlich wrote as a network defender, either for technical or pol
Read more

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Are Not Tactics

Image
Just what are "tactics"? Introduction MITRE ATT&CK  is a great resource, but something about it has bothered me since I first heard about it several years ago. It's a minor point, but I wanted to document it in case it confuses anyone else. The MITRE ATT&CK Design and Philosophy document from March 2020 says the following: At a high-level, ATT&CK is a behavioral model that consists of the following core components: • Tactics, denoting short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack; • Techniques, describing the means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals; • Sub-techniques, describing more specific means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals at a lower level than techniques; and • Documented adversary usage of techniques, their procedures, and other metadata. My concern is with MITRE's definition of "tactics" as "short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack," which is oddly recursive. The key word in the tacti
Read more