THE TWENTY-THIRD
Isaiah Thomas Award in Publishing
Sponsored by The Xerox Corporation
Presented to
TIM O’REILLY
Presented at
Seybold Seminars
New York
February 20, 2002
School of Printing Management and Sciences
College of Imaging Arts & Sciences
ROCHESTER INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
ROCHESTER, NEW YORK
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Tim O’Reilly
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Tim O’Reilly
im O’Reilly is founder and president of O’Reilly & Associates, thought
by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. In addition to publishing pioneering books like Ed Krol’s The Whole Internet User’s
Guide & Catalog (selected by the New York Public Library as one of the
most significant books of the twentieth century), O’Reilly has also been a
pioneer in the popularization of the Internet. O’Reilly’s Global Network
Navigator site (GNN, which was sold to America Online in September
1995) was the first Web portal and the first true commercial site on the
World Wide Web.
The Isaiah Thomas Award, named for one of America’s great patriot
printers, is awarded annually by the School of Printing Management and
Sciences in recognition of outstanding contributions to the publishing
industry. Mr. O’Reilly is the 23nd recipient of the award.
Isaiah Thomas established The Massachusetts Spy in 1779 at a print
shop known as “the sedition factory” by the British colonial government.
Legend has it that Thomas rode with Paul Revere to rouse the militia for
the battles of Lexington and Concord. He continued his career as a publisher after the Revolutionary War, and in 1810 wrote The History of Printing
in America, which is still in print and regarded as the basic source of information on early American printing and publishing.
O’Reilly continues to pioneer new content developments on the
Web via its O’Reilly Network affiliate, which also manages sites such as
www.perl.com and xml.com. O’Reilly’s conference arm hosts the popular
Perl Conference, the Open Source Software Convention, and the O’Reilly
Emerging Technology Conference.
Tim has been an activist for Internet standards and for Open Source
software. He has led successful public relations campaigns on behalf of key
Internet technologies, helping to block Microsoft’s 1996 limits on TCP/IP
in NT Workstation, organizing the “summit” of key free software leaders
where the term “Open Source” was first widely agreed upon, and, most
recently, organizing a series of protests against frivolous software patents.
Tim received Infoworld’s Industry Achievement Award in 1998 for his
advocacy on behalf of the Open Source community.
Tim has written numerous books on computer topics, most notably
UNIX Text Processing (with Dale Dougherty; Howard Sams, 1987), Managing UUCP and USENET (with Grace Todino; no longer in print), The X
Window System Users’ Guide (with Valerie Quercia), and The X Toolkit Intrin-
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sics Programming Manual (with Adrian Nye), UNIX Power Tools (with Jerry
Peek and Mike Loukides) and Windows 98 in a Nutshell (with Troy Mott and
Walter Glenn).
As an O’Reilly & Associates editor he has had a major hand in the
development of many of the company’s other titles, including UNIX in a
Nutshell, Programming Perl, Sendmail, Essential System Administration, and The
Cathedral and the Bazaar.
Tim also conceived an award-winning series of travel books, published by O’Reilly affiliate Travelers’ Tales. His company’s Patient Centered Guides provide information from “health system hackers”—patient
advocates who have experienced the best and worst of what the medical
system has to offer, and pass along their experience for sufferers of chronic
or life-changing diseases.
Tim has served on the board of trustees for both the Internet Society and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, two organizations devoted to
making sure that the Internet fulfills its promise. He is on the boards of CollabNet, ActiveState Tool Corp, and Webb, Inc. (part of Jabber.com).
Tim graduated from Harvard College in 1975 with a B.A. cum laude
in Classics. His honors thesis explored the tension between mysticism and
logic in Plato’s dialogues.
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The first O’Reilly book to be sold in bookstores.
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PROGRAM
INTRODUCTION
Frank Romano, Chair
School of Printing Management and Sciences
WELCOME
Peter Perine
Vice President/General Manager, Publishing
Xerox Worldwide Graphic Arts Industry Business
GREETINGS
Gene Gable, President
Seybold Seminars and Publications
INTRODUCTION OF SPEAKERS
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Michael Kleper, Professor
Paul and Louise Miller Distinguished Professor
School of Printing Management and Sciences
REMARKS
David Pogue
New York Times Technology Columnist and
O’Reilly Publishing Partner in the Missing Manual Series
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Paul Hilts
Publishing Industry Analyst
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Clay Shirky
Technology Writer and Consultant
Program
PRESENTATION OF AWARD
Dr. Joan Stone, Dean
College of Imaging Arts and Sciences
ACCEPTANCE OF AWARD
Tim O’Reilly
CLOSING REMARKS
Frank Romano
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The Wisdom of Tim O’Reilly
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The Wisdom of Tim O’Reilly
ou don’t know exactly where you’re going. But you know what you’re
looking for, and you trust yourself to know when you find it. This
approach takes a lot of courage, a lot of tolerance for ambiguity, a willingness to pass up short term opportunities that somehow don’t seem quite
right, an ability to change direction suddenly when you realize that one
path you’ve headed down doesn’t quite take you where you want to go.... I
could go on and on.
The point I’m trying to make is that this effort has been entirely in
the same spirit that launched our book publishing efforts in the first place.
That spirit of exploration driven by “I know what I’m looking for” that’s
so foreign to most business planning is the very essence of what has made
ORA successful.
Edwin Schlossberg said, “The skill of writing is to create a context
in which other people can think.” This is true of fiction as well as nonfiction, of poetry as well as scientific papers. The ways that you create that
context differ from format to format, but if you understand that a big part
of your job is building a framework within which your reader will work, and
upon which he or she will elaborate, you’re a good part of the way toward
becoming a successful writer.
The Long View (internal company newsletter) September, 1993
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’m afraid we don’t look very much at what the competition is doing.
.In fact, if there are good books in an area, we tend to stay away from
it (unless we were there first, in which case we’ll continue to expand our
program.) Our main goal in publishing books is to be useful, which generally means documenting things for which there isn’t already a good book.
Sometimes it means rethinking an existing area to bring out important
information that’s been overlooked.
We think of our fundamental mission as knowledge transfer: finding
out cool things that people at the leading edge have figured out, and writing
it down so that others can learn from it.
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he opportunity that I built O’Reilly around was that the software
research community behind Unix didn’t see it as their objective to
produce a commercial operating system. They provided sufficient documentation to advance their own objectives. But when it came to reaching
a wider audience, there was a lot left unsaid. And by taking the time to fill
that gap, we were able to add enormous value.
If someone wants to write a book as a freely redistributable document, I’m happy to support them by publishing it, if it’s a worthwhile book.
But there are an awful lot of topics for which the finished book will never
exist unless someone has the financial incentive to create it.
My goal is to find the balance of free and proprietary that produces
the greatest amount of value, both for creators and for their users. I like
open-source software and open standards because they encourage creativity and allow easy entry to the market; I like commercial activity, which
sometimes (though not always) needs to be proprietary to a greater or lesser
extent to create enough revenue to justify itself, because it fills needs that
may not be addressed by volunteer or “scratch your own itch” efforts.
As an old teacher of mine once said, “You pick the hat to fit the
head.”
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want to say a bit more about what our books in these other areas (Travel
and Medical Books) have in common with our technical books. They
actually spring from a remarkably consistent vision: I have always thought
of our core competency as being one of solving information problems.
There are lots of areas where the gulf between the people in the know,
and the people who need to know, is wider than it should be. What we’ve
always tried to do was to bridge that gap, to write down what leading-edge
people know for the benefit of those who follow.
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e’re not just about computers or computer books. We’re really about
solving information problems. Our core mission is transferring information from people who have it to people who need it.
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The Wisdom of Tim O’Reilly
he absolute essential (as in any publishing) is to find an author who
has something to say. There are an awful lot of so-called technical
books written in which the knowledge level is amazingly thin. Some hack
writer goes through and writes up all the obvious stuff (which no one of any
sophistication needs a book for) and that’s that. We like to find people who
really know their stuff.
In fact, my favorite way to start a book is to find someone who
appears to be able to do magic. (Remember Arthur C. Clarke’s dictum:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”)
Then I ask them to spill the beans on what they do. For example, early
in my career (around 1983), I wrote what I think was the first-ever Unix
system administration manual. I was working on contract at an early workstation manufacturer, writing the documentation for their graphics subsystem. For Unix documentation, they were simply shipping the man pages.
And I noticed that the administrators seemed to know an awful lot of stuff
that wasn’t readily apparent from those pages! What’s more, when someone
wanted to know how to do something, they didn’t start with the man pages;
they started by asking one of the “wizards” how to do what they wanted. So
I asked the management, “Whom are your customers going to ask?” They
didn’t have a good answer, so I persuaded them that I ought to interview
the wizards and capture what they knew.
I eventually acquired the rights to that manual back from the vendor,
and subsequently licensed it to other companies. At one of those companies, it was rewritten and expanded by Mike Loukides, and then rewritten
and expanded once again by Aeleen Frisch, who worked for Mike. When
the company went out of business, I acquired the rights once again, and
Aeleen rewrote the book a third time. We published it as the now-classic
Essential System Administration.
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ersonal Goal: To become the information provider of choice to the
people who are shaping the future of our planet, and to enable change
by capturing and transmitting the knowledge of innovators and innovative
communities.
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e’ve actually gone so far as to correlate book sales in various technologies with the stock prices of related companies, and it’s shocking how
closely the curves overlap. Oracle book sales match Oracle’s stock price,
Java book sales track Sun’s stock price, and so on. This confirms a point that
I’ve often made: there’s a lot of faddishness in the computer book market,
in which people buy books to find out what’s hot, rather than because they
have real problems to solve. That’s why high-end publishers like O’Reilly,
Addison-Wesley, and Prentice-Hall tend to be less affected than entry-level
mass market publishers. Our books appeal to the hardcore practitioners
who need the information in their daily work, rather than just to the curious.
I
started my writing career as a critic. (I wrote capsule reviews of science
fiction for Library Journal, and then a book, unfortunately now out of
print, about science fiction writer Frank Herbert.) In writing about books,
I always tried to see what was good in them and provide background that
would help the reader get more out of them. This doesn’t mean that you
can’t find fault and provide constructive criticism, but, especially if there
are other books that cover the same subject matter, I’d rather praise a good
book than damn a bad one.
This is not dissimilar to my publishing philosophy. We try to write
books about interesting software, and just avoid boring software that there
isn’t much to say about. But once we make the choice to write or publish,
we focus in on what doesn’t work as well as what does, in a proportion that
will hopefully provide the most benefit to the reader. I remember working
with one of my authors in the days when I was an active editor. He complained that he couldn’t do a good job on one chapter because the software
was so buggy; I told him that made it one of the most important chapters! If
he glossed over the problems, the reader might well waste hours coming to
the same conclusion. He needed to be unstinting in working through this
particular subsystem and pointing out all the pitfalls, since his job was to be
a scout for the programmer and specify clearly what he’d found out.
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look forward to a world in which I have a cheap device that can hold hundreds or thousands of books. E-paper has the potential to create something that’s far more similar to a printed book than anything we’re seeing
today, and that will be an enormous convenience.
That being said, I’m very fond of paper books. I have run out of
wall space in my house for bookshelves. One of my hobbies is to collect old
editions of bestselling books from bygone eras (many of them now largely
forgotten) to find out just what people in that time found so compelling. I
find that many “great” books have a timeless quality, but the second tier
down, in which grand human themes stand out less than the time-bound
peculiarities of an age, provide a fascinating window onto the past.
One of the big worries I have about a shift to electronic books is that
older documents won’t be easily preserved. We already see this on the Web.
Electronic documents are more ephemeral than those in print. One area
where we see the difficulty of the lack of long-term electronic memory is in
the area of software patents. A great deal of knowledge dissemination now
occurs not via print (or even electronic journals) but in less formal types of
publishing such as Web pages or Usenet or mailing list postings. When the
Patent Office goes to look for “prior art” on patent applications, much of it
is invisible, and as a result, patents are being granted on many techniques
that have previously been invented or practiced by many others. This is
only one of many ways in which our social and regulatory systems haven’t
caught up with technology.
An even deeper worry is the trend toward locking up electronic
content too tightly. I was absolutely appalled by the recent comments
of Pat Schroeder, president of the Association of American Publishers,
attacking libraries for making electronic journals available to their readers
without charge. (See http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A365842001Feb7.html) Feeling threatened by the Internet, publishers in fields
from music to scientific journals are overreacting and overreaching. They
have gone beyond seeking “copy right” to seeking “reader right” or “performance right.” This is an extremely dangerous trend. For a blistering, and
all-too-prescient indictment of this trend, see John Gilmore’s thought-provoking essay “What’s Wrong with Copy Protection” (http://www.toad.com/
gnu/whatswrong.html).
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’Reilly was the first company ever to do advertising on the Web (in
1993, as part of the first release of our proto-portal, the Global Network Navigator, or GNN). At the time, nobody believed that advertising
online would work, and we had to do years of heavy lifting (eventually selling GNN to America Online in 1995) before the marketplace had evolved
enough to sustain ad-supported businesses like Yahoo! Now, while there
are still failures of ad-supported Web sites (just as there are failures of adsupported print magazines), no one disputes that it is a viable business
model that can lead to successful businesses (albeit not as many as joined
in the gold rush).
There will be many experiments. We’re running one ourselves. Our
recently released Safari eBooks service provides “O’Reilly content dial
tone,” so to speak, for a monthly subscription fee. NetLibrary is pursuing
the library model online. There will be many failures, but eventually also
many successes in online publishing.
The other thing that’s important to recognize is that new media
create new formats. You can’t just watch the success or failure of a direct
translation to a new medium. Movies were originally adapted from plays,
but eventually became a medium in their own right, with players and
dynamics very different from those of the theater. In some ways, interactive computer games are one successor to the novel (and the television
program)—and they are already a huge business. Web sites are successors
to magazines and newspapers and some types of books. For that matter,
online help has become a successor to one type of book—the software
manual!—such that David Pogue’s Missing Manual series and our own In a
Nutshell series have been able to exploit a real niche by providing a printbased alternative to information that is currently largely provided online.
The story is always more complicated than it looks, and attempts to simplify almost always get it wrong.
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hile it may seem trivial to produce an added e-book, and it probably
is, if all you’re doing is producing a PDF of an existing book, PDF
is far from the dominant way to deliver eBooks. There are lots of possible
ways to do it, ranging from developing online libraries and cross-book
searching and annotation tools, to breaking up books in different ways at
different price points. Any publisher exploring this area has added quite a
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few people, and paid lots of programmers and consultants to experiment
with things that have not yet paid for themselves. Believe me, at the
moment at least, eBook revenue is the most expensive revenue around for
a publisher.
Further, there are significant added “distribution” costs, at least
while the market is still immature. If online publishers were to come in
with a universal system for delivering eBooks, putting them out would be
as trivial as putting out print books, where there is a known distribution
system. But with everyone rolling their own system, publishers have to deal
with a hodgepodge of formats, business deals, negotiations, transfer and
update methods, and so on. This isn’t like getting a purchase order from
Borders or Ingram, and just shipping the books.
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t’s clear that the net will be commercialized in one way or another. The
choice we face is whether we adopt commercial models that reduce the
net’s vitality or ones that encourage it by providing incentives for even
more of what it’s good at.
As businesses approach the net, we each see it through the filter of
our past experience. So, perhaps:
• To a cable company, the net looks like thousands of channels for a
couch potato to surf through. (And certainly early returns from the
Web indicate that there is a market for this kind of passive infotainment, though I have my doubts about how long that stage will last.)
• To a software company, the net looks like an opportunity for an early
foot in the door that leads to market dominance as users standardize
on a few well known packages.
• To a big media conglomerate (television, newspapers, book publishing), the net looks like an opportunity to create “bestsellers” and
dominant brands.
• To a small publisher, the net looks like an unparalleled opportunity
to find and fill real user needs, to talk directly with customers and to
create information products that serve them.
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Publishing Models for Internet Commerce, June 19, 1995
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rademark may turn out to be a far more important form of intellectual
property protection for the net than copyright. An intellectual property-based brand or trademark is a kind of “standing wave” through which
a changing body of content flows. A news magazine doesn’t own the news it
reports, it owns its name and the point of view associated with that name.
For information products, a brand is far more than a trademark,
though. It must also represent a consistent point of view, a consistent selection of information. The animal on the cover alerts a reader to the fact that
he’s picking up an O’Reilly book, but it’s the consistent subject matter and
treatment that makes many customers buy everything we publish.
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he term “online book” seems to suggest a single purchase, akin to the
purchase of a print book. However, because the net offers the possibility of ongoing update, the subscription may be a more appropriate concept.
After all, the book itself is an ongoing service.
I eventually expect to see standalone online products sold by subscription; we’re coming very close to the mechanisms needed to make this
widespread and widely accepted. In the short term, hybrid print/CD/online
products hold a great deal of promise. These products allow publishers to
take advantage of their current methods of distribution, plus provide consumers with a local cache of high-volume data on a CD, relying on the
Internet for access to an even deeper or more current body of information.
Purchase of the book/CD will entitle someone to access to the
online center for a given period of time. Gradually, users will migrate to
being direct subscribers of the online service.
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Publishing Models for Internet Commerce, June 19, 1995
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reedom Zero for me is to offer the fruit of your work on the terms that
work for you. I think that is what is absolutely critical here. Let there
be competition in the marketplace; that is the answer. Let people use whatever license they choose and if their customers don’t like it they will have
other choices. Because of the technological changes, we are entering an
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The Wisdom of Tim O’Reilly
era of greater choice. The fact is, Microsoft’s past history is past. We are
entering a new era, not of just open source but of profound technological
changes. The future is open and we can make that future be what we want
it to be.
Some people might not recognize the reference to “Freedom Zero”
as a takeoff on the first of Richard Stallman’s four freedoms from the Free
Software Definition:
• “The freedom to run the program, for any purpose. (freedom 0)”
• “The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your
needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for
this.”
• “The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor
(freedom 2).”
• “The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.”
I love the concept of “Freedom Zero,” which sounds to me like it
ought to be the absolute foundation on which all the other freedoms are
based. But at the risk of sounding like “warmed over Ayn Rand,” I don’t
think Richard got Freedom 0 right. There’s an even more fundamental
freedom that underlies the work of both free software advocates and the
most proprietary of software developers, as well as anyone else engaged in
creative work. And that is the freedom to offer your work to the world on
the terms that you choose, and for the recipients to accept or reject those
terms.
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was talking with some friends recently, friends who don’t own a computer. They were thinking of getting one so they could use Amazon.com
to buy books and CDs. Not to use “the Internet,” not to use “the Web,” but
to use Amazon.com. Now, that’s the classic definition of a “killer application”: one that makes someone go out and buy a computer.
What’s interesting is that the killer application is no longer a desktop
productivity application or even a back-office enterprise software system,
but an individual web site. And once you start thinking of web sites as
applications, you soon come to realize that they represent an entirely new
breed, something you might call an “information application,” or perhaps
even “infoware.”
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Information applications are used to computerize tasks that just
couldn’t be handled in the old computing model. A few years ago, if you
wanted to search a database of a million books, you talked to a librarian,
who knew the arcane search syntax of the available computerized search
tools and might be able to find what you wanted. If you wanted to buy
a book, you went to a bookstore, and looked through its relatively small
selection. Now, tens of thousands of people with no specialized training
find and buy books online from that million-record database every day.
The secret is that computers have come one step closer to the way
that people communicate with each other. Web-based applications use
plain English to build their interface—words and pictures, not specialized
little controls that acquire meaning only as you learn the software.
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he availability of the PC as a commodity platform (as well as the
development of open systems platforms such as Unix) changed the
rules in a fundamental way. Suddenly, the barriers to entry were low, and
entrepreneurs such as Mitch Kapor of Lotus and Bill Gates took off.
If you look at the early history of the Web, you see a similar pattern.
Microsoft’s monopoly on desktop software had made the barriers to entry
in the software business punishingly high. What’s more, software applications had become increasingly complex, with Microsoft putting up deliberate barriers to entry against competitors. It was no longer possible for a
single programmer in a garage (or a garret) to make an impact.
This is perhaps the most important point to make about opensource software: it lowers the barriers to entry into the software market. You
can try a new product for free—and even more than that, you can build your
own custom version of it, also for free. Source code is available for massive
independent peer review. If someone doesn’t like a feature, they can add
to it, subtract from it, or reimplement it. If they give their fix back to the
community, it can be adopted widely very quickly.
What’s more, because developers (at least initially) aren’t trying to
compete on the business end, but instead focus simply on solving real problems, there is room for experimentation in a less punishing environment.
As has often been said, open-source software “lets you scratch your own
itch.” Because of the distributed development paradigm, with new features
being added by users, open-source programs “evolve” as much as they are
designed.
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Indeed, the evolutionary forces of the market are freer to operate
as nature “intended” when unencumbered by marketing barriers or bundling deals, the equivalent of prosthetic devices that help the less-than-fit
survive.
Evolution breeds not a single winner, but diversity.
Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, “Hardware, Software,
and Infoware,” Tim O’Reilly, 1st Edition, January, 1999, 1-56592-582-3.
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ltimately, people buy computer books for substance, not enthusiasm.
So regardless of whether you are an true believer and evangelist or
simply a hired professional, it’s your ability to figure out what the reader
needs to know, your ability to walk ahead of him on the path he’s treading,
find the muddy spots and the tigers, as well as the vista points off the main
trail, that is going to make the reader come back for more. A good book is
a good book. No amount of passion will turn a piece of fluff into a useful
book, but your enthusiasm, and yes, your evangelism for a technology you
believe in, can turn a good book into a great one.
I
heard a cute story from one of our bookstores: a Microsoft Press representative told them that O’Reilly had an “unfair competitive advantage over
Microsoft, because we could tell the truth about their products.” Because
it’s Microsoft, whom everyone loves to bash, we can all chuckle and leave it
to that. But I think there’s more to this story than that.
One of the reasons that I started O’Reilly was because as a tech
writer doing contract work for companies, I couldn’t always tell the truth.
I’d want to write about bugs and problems so I could offer workarounds,
and the company would say “you can’t say that about our product!” So
when we started publishing our own books, I made that a centerpiece of
our philosophy.
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rom fairly early on, we became evangelists for the technologies we
believed in at O’Reilly. We learned this from Brian Erwin, now our VP
of Business Development, who came to us in 1992 from the Sierra Club,
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where he was its director of activism. He urged us not to promote our products, but the big issues behind them. I’ve followed his advice ever since.
We did this first with the Internet, which we found so exciting that
we sent out thousands of copies of The Whole Internet User’s Guide to journalists (not just people who normally reviewed computer books), members of
congress, etc. We thought this was an important subject to know about.
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ote however that the gong I’ve consistently sounded with regard to
open source has not been about the superiority of Linux over Windows (both have strengths and weaknesses), but about the importance of
technologies that are being overlooked by the mainstream. We’ve tried to
bring to public awareness key technologies that matter to them in ways
they don’t suspect.
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ong term, I think that the computer book industry (and computers
themselves) will lose their current cachet. The current fascination with
computers reminds me of nothing so much as the car craze of the fifties and
early sixties. People work on their computers now with the same zeal that
their fathers worked on their souped up engines.
Computer books will go the way of those under the hood car repair
books that used to be widespread.
Computers themselves won’t go away. They’ll become increasingly
present in every facet of our lives. But they’ll get smarter, and easier to use,
and people just won’t “care” about them as much.
They’ll care more about the kinds of things that they can do with
them. Which means that computer books, as a category (except for books
for computer professionals) will gradually merge with other kinds of how to
books, as computers just become a tool in other fields.
Of course, there will be enormous opportunities for new kinds of
publishing—what I call “information ware”—assemblages of information
that act as a user interface to ever larger bodies of specialized information.
So there will be plenty of work for authors who know that their real skill is
untangling complex information problems.
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The Wisdom of Tim O’Reilly
he working programmers who are building the innovative new applications of the Internet—the actual inventors whom the patent system
is supposed to protect—feel threatened by the expansion of software patents. The Internet industry was built on open standards, open source, and
a great deal of imitation. Now, the rules are changing, as lawyers and big
companies get involved, and the people who’ve made this one of the most
exciting and dynamic industries out there today are worried. Tim BernersLee says: “the whole development and standards process...is in a precarious state.” At least in the Internet industry, and quite possibly in all of the
software industry, it seems likely that the consensus among actual developers is that patents hurt rather than harm their ability to innovate.
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Past Recipients
1979 RONALD A. WHITE
President, Graphic Systems Division, Rockwell International
1980 ROBERT G. MARBUT
President and CEO, Hart-Hanks Communications, Inc.
1981 ALLEN H. NEUHARTH
Chairman and President, Gannett Company, Inc.
1982 EDWARD W. ESTLOW
President, The E. W. Scripps Company
1983 KATHARINE GRAHAM
President, Washington Post Company
1984 ARTHUR OCHS SULZBERGER
Chairman and CEO, New York Times Company
1985 OTIS CHANDLER
Chairman and Editor-in-Chief, Times Mirror Company
1986 ALVAH H. CHAPMAN JR.
Chairman and CEO, Knight-Rider Newspaper, Inc.
1987 STANTON R. COOK
President and CEO, Tribune Company
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1988 WARREN H. PHILLIPS
Chairman and CEO, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
1990 FRANK A. BENNACK JR.
President and CEO, The Hearst Corporation
1991 JAMES C. KENNEDY
Chairman and CEO, Cox Enterprises, Inc.
1992 ROBERT F. ERBURU
Chairman and CEO, Times-Mirror Company
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1993 CHARLES T. BRUMBACK
Chairman and CEO, Tribune Company
Past Recipients
1994 JOHN J. CURLEY
Chairman, President and CEO, Gannett Company, Inc.
1995 LAWRENCE A. LESER
Chairman and CEO, The E. W. Scripps Company
1996 FRANK BATTEN
Chairman of the Board, Landmark Communications, Inc.
1997 P. ANTHONY RIDDER
Chairman and CEO, Knight-Ridder, Inc.
1998 DONA VIOLET A BARRIOS de CHAMORRO
Sra. Expresidenta de Nicaragua
1999 GARY B. PRUITT
President and CEO, The McClatchy Company
2000 WILLIAM BURLEIGH
Chairman, The E.W. Scripps Company
2001 JOHN W. SEYBOLD
Founder and President, ROCAPPI
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Isaiah Thomas was one of America’s great
patriot printers; he was born in Boston in 1749,
and apprenticed to a local printer at the tender
age of six. It was immediately apparent that
he was no ordinary apprentice, as young Isaiah
learned his alphabet and his type case at the
same time. He made many improvements in
the quality of his master’s printing and at the
age of 14 began traveling along the eastern
seaboard. Thomas returned to Boston in the
spring of 1770 and began publication of his
newspaper, The Massachusetts Spy. He became
involved with radicals such as John Hancock,
Thomas Young and Joseph Greenleaf, and the
Spy became the mouthpiece for the Sons of
Liberty. In April of 1775, Thomas was one
of Paul Revere’s riders. During the war years,
Thomas moved his printshop to Worcester in
order to continue printing for Hancock and the
Provincial Congress. He continued in Worcester after the Revolutionary War, establishing
himself as perhaps one of the most important
publishers in the country. He certainly was
the most innovative, enjoying great commercial success. Thomas had always used the best
types and papers available, importing great quantities of types from the foundries of
Caslon, Fry and Wilson. Thomas’s Type Specimen Book of 1775, the folio Bible of 170l and
his History of Printing in America of 1810 are but three of his great achievements in printing.
In 1812, Isaiah Thomas founded the American Antiquarian Society and his generous contributions over the years established the society as his greatest monument. Isaiah Thomas
died in Worcester, Massachusetts on April 4, 1831.
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About Isaiah Thomas
Specimen of Isaiah Thomas’s Printing Types
(1785)
Thomas issued the first American type specimen, printed in Worcester in 1785 entitled
Specimen of Isaiah Thomas’s Printing Types.
“Being as large and complete an ASSORTMENT,” he claimed, “as to be met with in
any one Printing-Office in AMERICA.”
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Tim O’Reilly
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The Ecology of E-Book Publishing*
Ecology of E-Book Publishing
Tim O’Reilly
I
want to have a conversation with you about my experience in two different realms of publishing—print and web publishing—and draw some
conclusions from those things about the brave new world of e-books that
we’re facing today.
The first thing I want to talk about is my evolution as a print book
publisher, and I actually brought a couple of show-and-tell items. [Shows
an early O’Reilly book, a pamphlet called Reading and Writing Termcap
Entries.] Those of you who have been around a long time in publishing
might remember these. This was one of my first books. I printed, I think, a
hundred copies of this book at a local copy shop. Even though this is close
to the beginning, this actually isn’t a first edition. I know that because it has
an index in it and the first edition didn’t. These books didn’t have ISBNs,
so, again, I know this is not a first edition because it has an ISBN on the
back.
My point is that I didn’t know very much about publishing. Our first
review lamented the fact that we didn’t have any of the normal things that
were expected in a book. We knew nothing about publishing. We were just
a bunch of tech writers who thought, “Well, let’s write down some things
that we know about and see if we can sell these things.” We sold these
little pamphlets for five bucks and took them to a trade show in New York,
UNIX Expo in 1985, and today we’re one of the leading computer book
publishers. We have a very well-known brand. I’ll bring one of our contemporary books—let me see. [Shows a copy of Programming Perl.]
Those of you who are out there in the computer book market know
this brand—these books with the animals on the covers. We’re probably the
number two or three computer book publisher in the country in terms of
sales. We’re very highly respected.
But, what was really interesting to me is the difference in the path
that took me from that first book, the little pamphlet, to being a full-fledged
computer book publisher as compared to a very different path that I expe-
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*Presented at the Digital Rights Management and Digital Distribution for Publishing
held August 15th and 16th, 2000, at the Hotel Niko in San Francisco, California. This conference is presented by the International Quality and Productivity Center. Edited somewhat for continuity and clarity.
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rienced in the early 90s as a web publisher. I’m going to give you a little
re-cap of that second part and then I’ll pull the two back together.
We started out in the late 80s being interested in online publishing.
We had developed a series of books on a technology called the X Window
System, and these books were used by all of the large computer workstation
vendors as documentation. They all came to us with a problem, which was
that many of them were shipping our books as their documentation, and
now many of these companies said, “You know, we’d like to do away with
printed documentation. We want to ship only online documentation.”
They came to us with what they thought was a wonderful value
proposition. They said “Just put your books into fill-in the blank”—it was
IBM Info-Explorer, Sun Answer Book, HP LaserROM—each one of them
had their own proprietary system. And we said, “Oh, this doesn’t sound like
a very good business to us. We’ll find ourselves always chasing all these different formats.” So, we said, “No, we have a better idea. We want to come
up with a common format for technical books. You guys all learn to read it.”
So, we started working with SGML and came up with a DTD for technical
manuals called Docbook, which some of you may know a little bit about.
But, that wasn’t the biggest part of the problem. I mean, it certainly
solved some problems. We were able to represent our books online, even
very complicated materials that are still too difficult for many of the e-book
offerings today. But, that wasn’t enough. We took a side-trip as we started
working with Docbook. We said “Gee, we want to have a free reader that
people can play around with,” so you don’t have to go buy one of these
electronic book products to see this online documentation.
We got this cool tool called Viola, which was developed by a guy
at UC Berkeley. It was an SGML browser. But, it also happened to be a
browser for something else, namely the World Wide Web, which at that
point had a couple of hundred sites. And we thought this was just the coolest thing ever. So, we took a big side-trip. We said “The Web is really interesting, so let’s put this electronic book stuff aside. Let’s build a Web site.”
We actually started with a pilot program to put Internet kiosks into
bookstores to try to help sell our Internet books. But what happened was
interesting. The idea was people could type in things and try the Internet.
But Pei Wei, the guy who’d written the Viola browser, set out to make this
demo using hyperlinks, where you can just point and click.
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Ecology of E-Book Publishing
We looked at that and we said, “That’s not a demo, that’s a product.”
And so out of that came this site called GNN, or the Global Network Navigator, which was a guide to what was on the Internet. At the time there
wasn’t very much. This was in 1992. We had published a book called The
Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog, which was a huge bestseller, and
part of what was in that book was a catalog of various interesting Internet
sites—it filled about 20 or 30 pages in the back of the book. We thought,
“We can make a demo for how to connect to all of these sites using this new
World Wide Web technology.” And, that’s really what GNN started out as,
it started out as a demo.
GNN was really a prototype for a lot of things that you see
today—we were the first online magazine, the first online catalog. Before
sites like Hotwired or Salon, before Yahoo. So, all the sites that now are the
staples of the Internet were really knockoffs of GNN. And it was also the
first advertiser-supported site on the Internet of any kind. We got a special
dispensation from the National Science Foundation to do advertising. So,
we were part of that breaking down this idea that the Internet was only for
academia.
So that’s background, but what happened? We found that we had an
enormous amount of heavy lifting to do. And that’s my point.
In the book space, we were able to start knowing nothing, publish
this little pamphlet, and we were sucked into an existing distribution
system. We were taught by the system what the rules were. So, in book
publishing, for instance, if the first editions didn’t have any of the normal
apparatus, people told us that and we knew just what to do. You know, we
found out this was a system for registering books. We went, “Oh, good. We
can do that.” We got an account with Bowker and started filing our ISBNs
and getting listed in the appropriate catalogs. And there’s this big distribution system out there and eventually bookstores started calling up. Among
the big guys, it was Borders who found us first. They were watching what
was happening at an independent book seller called SoftPro—and they saw
somebody carry up a stack of our entire 10 volumes of X Window System
books to the counter and they said “Who are these guys?” And so they
called up and started buying books from us.
I think we were a $9 million dollar a year company before we sold
books to Ingram [the largest book wholesaler in the country, and a prime
sales target for every experienced publisher]. We didn’t know who they
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were. We just didn’t know anything about the system. But there was a rich
ecology in place in the book industry, where there were wholesalers, there
were retailers, there were various kinds of suppliers who came together and
it was fairly easy to learn what the rules were and how to play by them.
Now we come over to my other story. Here we were with GNN.
This thing on the Web turned out to be a very big and exciting business.
But we had a problem. Nobody believed in it yet. We were very early, we
were a small company, since it was at about that same time when we were
just starting to really get traction in the book business.
I should add—we started publishing in 1985. We really committed
to book publishing in 1988 with this X Window System series of books. I
know I’m rambling a little bit, but the whole thing was just really great,
just how open and how easy it was to get into the business. We sold 10,000
copies of a two-volume set of X Window System books that we printed at
copy shops on xerox machines. We took down some drafts to the second
MIT X conference and people went nuts and so we went up to the copy
shop and printed some more.
But anyway, so here we were with GNN and we’re trying to persuade people that the Internet is going to be a big thing and, for example,
that advertising might be a good business model.
And we had to commission the first market research study of the
size of the Internet to try to persuade people that advertising might work.
Nobody believed in it. We actually had to go out and start another business
to support what we wanted to do with GNN.
The point is that the Web, in its early stages, was exceedingly difficult. We had to do an immense amount of evangelizing about the technology—what would work, what wouldn’t. It was experimentation on business
models, experimentation on even how to execute on the business models
that we imagined. So, for example, we now are very used to the idea of
whether you have a banner ad and that ad clicks through to a different
ad server. There are even companies out there that provide the service of
rotating ads. Well, we had to do everything, even host the ads themselves,
because the potential customers didn’t have their own web servers yet—
we did it all.
We invested a great deal in GNN but eventually we had to sell it
because we couldn’t afford to keep it up even though it was potentially a
terrific business.
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Ecology of E-Book Publishing
Even now the web is not a fully developed ecosystem, but you can
see that here, seven years after we started doing commercial Web sites,
there’s a rich ecology of players who help each other to succeed. There are
companies that do analysis of your site traffic. There are companies that
serve your ads. There are companies that understand how to buy the ads.
There are companies that follow the market and track who’s got market
share. There are people who resell ads on behalf of other people and ad
networks. So, over time we developed in the Web space a mini analog to
what we had earlier in the print space, which waslots of different companies
working together in a kind of business ecology.
So, with all this as backdrop, I want to just talk a little bit about
where we are right now with e-books. I don’t know how long all of you
have been working with e-books, but I’m now tracing my work in trying
to get this puppy to fly, for 12 to 13 years. Actually, 14. Our first e-book
was in 1986. And I see that the biggest problem is the lack of an ecology.
And ecology is a really good metaphor for thinking about how marketplaces
develop.
When you look at, say, ecological reclamations, for example what
happened around Mt. St. Helens when it exploded, you have this gradual
resurgence of species. One species makes way for another. So primitive
plants will break down the rock and gradually make some soil so that something else can take root. There really isn’t time to grow mature forests on,
say, the bed of just-cool lava. This is also the way ecosystems develop in
business. You have to say, “Okay, you’ve got to break this thing down.”
And we’re still in that stage for e-books. I know this doesn’t really
give us a great deal of guidance about what works in the e-book space, but
it does give us a lot of guidance about what will not work.
What I think will not work are approaches that try to go it alone. For
example, when FatBrain launched MightyWords, I had mighty words with
Chris McCaskill, the CEO, because I thought his model was fundamentally
broken. Why was it broken? Because he failed to think through the driving
forces that make ecologies necessary.
Let me give you an example, just thinking mathematically about
publishing. There are by most accounts 50 or 60 thousand books published
a year. If we look at the Amazon-sized databases, we know that several million books are in print. Now, we also know that there are some tens of millions of customers. So, if we have an assumption that the model is the direct
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sales of all books to all customers, we have a massive mathematical problem. One million books times ten million customers means something like
ten trillion possible matchups.
Now, if you’re Stephen King, you’re visible enough that you can
in fact build a direct business. But the reason why wholesalers and retailers exist in the print publishing world isn’t some plot, isn’t some kind of
entrenched monopoly. We don’t have this seemingly inefficient distribution system because of diabolical market forces where people have seized
the high ground and won’t let it go. You have to deal with simple mathematical reality. Wholesalers aggregate publishers for retailers. Retailers aggregate customers for publishers. They make this thing mathematically more
manageable.
So, when you’re starting to look at distribution models for any kind
of online publishing, you have to think through the math. The fact that
it’s online doesn’t change anything that has to do with the way you reach
customers. At the end of the day, if you’re in a direct business now, you’re
in a pretty good position because you know your customer. But if you’re in
a publishing business that reaches its customers indirectly, you need to wait
for eBook distribution networks to develop.
I had this conversation once with a guy who published a high-tech
newsletter—this was maybe in 97—and he said, “Gee, should I get on the
Web?” I said “How many of your customers do you have a direct relationship with?” He said “All of them.” I said “It’s a no-brainer, because all
you’re doing then is offering them a choice of what delivery vehicle they
want for your information.”
On the other hand, when you’re looking at, as MightyWords was, a
class of information that’s typically sold to anonymous customers, people
who you don’t have a direct relationship with (and in fact aren’t likely to
because there is not really a lot of commonality between the content that
you’re offering), then, you think “Gee, I’m going to take on trying to build
a direct business out of nothing.”
Now, would you do that in print? Would you say, “Hey, I’m just
going to try to build a direct catalog business that will list thousands of
random books?” Probably not. It’s a bad idea. And so my complaint with
MightyWords was that they were not looking at the way that the digital
book ecosystem would eventually need to look like the print book ecosystem if it were to succeed.
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Ecology of E-Book Publishing
The thing that makes me believe that e-book publishing may be
poised to take off is that I’m starting to see businesses that don’t say “Oh,
yeah, we’re going to do it all ourselves.” I see businesses that say “Here’s
how we’re going to enable this class of partner. This is how we’re going to
enable that class of partner.”
When Microsoft gave their pitch on their e-book reader, a lot of it
was about how this would work with publishers, how it would work with
wholesalers, how it would work with retailers, how it would work with
direct customers. There was some serious thinking there about the fact
that you can’t just collapse the entire ecosystem. Whereas MightyWords, in
their initial incarnation, set out and said “We’re going to collapse the whole
system from publisher up through retailer. We’re going to be a one-stop
shop. We’ll collect the content, we’ll publish the content, we’ll be the only
source for reselling the content.”
Now, I believe that distribution systems exist for the same reason
that we have alveoli in our lungs. They create surface area. You know, any
of you who have been in publishing know that there are two classes of customers. There are the people who already know that they want your product, who can come to you directly, and then there’s the people who are
going to encounter your product by chance. For most of book publishing
and certainly for most of trade book publishing, the people who are going
to encounter your product by chance are far greater in number than the
people who are going to seek it out.
Now, I’m in a fortunate end of the business where, for example, a
book like Programming Perl is the only book by the author of a program
that’s very widely used and so people say, “Oh, there’s a new book out by
Larry Wall” and they look for it. There are tens of thousands to buy it and
there’s a ready-made direct audience. And, certainly, you have people like
Stephen King, or Prince, who has done this in the music world, who have
already built up an audience over time and who can say, “Hey, come to me
directly.”
But, for the most part, digital publishing and online publishing systems are going to have to re-create the kind of richness of distribution networks that we see in the print world. So, the systems that we provide have
to allow for the kinds of behaviors that have supported our print marketplaces. So when you’re evaluating an e-book distribution system, you have
to ask yourself questions like “Does it have pricing and mechanisms that
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support pass-through by multiple layers of wholesalers or retailers or distributors?” because you can’t assume that you will have a direct relationship
with everyone who might want to sell your books. Is there a mechanism for
someone to pick up part of the margin? What does pricing look like? If you
haven’t thought that through, we don’t have a viable system, or we have a
viable system that will support only direct to consumer sales.
I don’t want to beat on MightyWords too much because they have,
in fact, been evolving their business model, but it was pretty obvious to me
from the front end that they had some serious problems. For example, they
went out saying “We will be able to give this great royalty to the author”
but there was no margin in there for anyone else. So, out of the box, that
was a winner-take-all game plan. It’s one that says “Okay, we’re going to get
all the customers for ourselves.”
In the technical book space, there have actually been a number of
eBook “aggregators” who came up with business models that defied mathematical reality.
For example, there is somebody called ITKnowledge.com.
ITKnowledge.com came to us with what they felt was a great offer. They
said, “Gee, we’ll make you rich and famous. We’re going to put your books
on the Web.” And so we said “Okay, tell us the deal.” They said “Well,
we’re going to allocate 20 percent of the revenues to the publishers. We’re
going to charge customers $299 a year—though it later fell down to $99 a
year—for access to these thousands of books.”
And the thousands number stuck in my head because Ingram puts
out a listing called the top one thousand computer books. I said “Let’s
assume you have a thousand books on ITKnowledge.com. Let’s just assume
we get the same percentage of those thousand books that we get out of
the Ingram top one thousand, which was easily 15 percent of that list in
our books. So, let me assume that I’m going to get 15 percent of your 20
percent.” I did the math for them out loud and said, “So, ultimately, what
you’re offering publishers is 6 cents per book per customer.” And they
went, “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” I said “So, now you tell me how you
think I’m going to make a business on that.”
So once again, you see a flawed business model that doesn’t have
any room for an ecology in which multiple parties all make money.
At that point it’s like a come-on offer with no follow through. I guess
what I’ve seen in the early days of this market are a lot of ideas like that that
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just don’t have staying power. And I said “Gee, maybe your business plan is
this thing that will create buzz and you’ll make money in the stock market
and maybe you should be paying the publishers and authors in stock if
that’s the business plan, but don’t tell us that this is a good deal when, if
you do the math, it isn’t.”
I see a lot of very immature thinking in this space that somehow,
because it’s the computer world, that all the rules are different. You know,
mathematics still apply. Business still applies.
One of the things that also bothers me about some of the digital
rights software that’s out there is that it makes it hard for you as a user to
share information that you have. Now, there’s a lot of fear about piracy, but
there are some real dangers in the other direction as well. When I have a
printed book, when I’m done with it, I can resell it, I can give it away to
a friend. I very often will loan books to people who will then go buy their
own copy. One book I found recently in a used bookstore I then went and
ordered 15 copies of, simply because I thought it was a great book and I
wanted to pass along. So, if we cut off things like the first sale right, used
books, the ability to loan a book to a friend, in our approach to digital publishing, that pass-along ability, we cripple the ecosystem in a small way.
And I’m not suggesting that I know the answers for every aspect of
digital publishing. I don’t by any means. But, I do know some things that
are signs that somebody’s going awry. And those signs are trying to swallow
too much of the market at once. They’re not figuring out how many other
people they can enable. They’re not thinking through all of the people who
may currently benefit or participate in the market.
This cuts so many different ways. It has a lot to do with how you
think about royalties, for example. If the idea is that, as many authors would
like to have it, digital books are a rights sale and, therefore, the authors
should get 50 percent, then what they’re saying is “Well, this is a short distribution chain. There’s not many players in this.”
That’s an implicit judgment that people are making. And what I’m
telling you is that markets with short distribution chains are generally small
markets. If you want a big market, you have to enable lots of players. So,
thinking through the math of everything from royalties to wholesalers to
how we build a rich infrastructure for e-book publishing is a lot of what I
want you all to think about.
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So, the message that I really want you to just keep thinking about is
that while things start simple, they grow complex. This is good. This is not
bad. When the e-book marketplace is mature, we will see lots of intermediaries.
I can’t emphasize how much the rhetoric of the early Web reminds
me of some of the rhetoric of e-book publishing. What we heard was that
the Web was going to disintermediate everyone. That was the big buzz
word, disintermediation. We hear this again in e-book publishing. The
authors are saying, “Wow, I’ll be able to go out directly and sell e-books to
my customers.” Again, some ebook vendors, like MightyWords, are pandering to that: “You can just publish directly and the world will come to your
door.” And this was a mistaken impression. What really happened in the
Web was that there were some illusions early in the market. There were
skews that were caused by the fact that there weren’t that many players yet.
You were able to say, “Oh, yeah, everybody’s equal on the Web. Everybody
can have their own Web site.” And that worked when there were only a few
thousand Web sites. It doesn’t work when there are millions, because of all
a sudden the user says, “Well, I can’t sort through all that stuff.”
You guys have all worked with search engines and you never go past
maybe page two of search results. So, we start to say, “Well, gee, who’s
going to help me find my way?”
Until we have the development of a series of intermediaries who
are the equivalent of the Books in Print or the Reader’s Guide to Periodical
Literature, search engines, Yahoo, people like that, we won’t have an eBook
industry that works.
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Information wants to be Valuable
Information wants to be Valuable
Tim O’Reilly
I
nformation doesn’t want to be free. Information wants to be valuable.”
I first heard this gem from Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming
language. Like many other open-source software authors, from Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, to Tim Berners-Lee and his spiritual descendants
at the Apache web server project, Larry discovered that one way to make
his information (i.e., his software) more valuable was to make it free. Larry
was thus able to increase its utility not only for himself (because others
who took it up made changes and enhancements that he could use), but
for everyone else who uses it, because as software becomes more ubiquitous it can be taken for granted as a foundation for further work. The Internet (based on freely available software including TCP/IP, BIND, Apache,
Sendmail and so on) demonstrates clearly just how much value can be created by the distribution of freely available software.
Nonetheless, it is also clear that others, Bill Gates being the paramount example, have found that the best way to make their information
valuable is to restrict access to it. No-one can question that Microsoft
has created enormous value for itself and its shareholders, and even its
critics should admit that Microsoft has been a key enabler of the ubiquitous personal computing on which so much of our modern business world
depends.
What many people fail to realize is that both Larry Wall and Bill
Gates have a great deal in common: as the creators (albeit with a host of
co-contributors) of a body of intellectual work, they have made strategic
decisions about how best to maximize its value. History has proven that
each of their strategies can work. The question, then, is one of goals, and
of the strategies to reach those goals. The question for publishers and other
middlemen who are not themselves the creators of the content they distribute, is how best to serve those goals. Information wants to be valuable.
Publishers must focus on increasing the value, both to its producers and to
its consumers, of the information they aggregate and distribute.
I am neither a practising scientist nor a publisher of scientific journals, but as a book and web publisher who works on a regular basis to document widely available ‘infrastructure’ software (both free and commercial),
I am daily confronted with decisions akin to those reflected in the debate
now being carried in these pages. Because I publish books about free soft-
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ware, the people best qualified to write about it are often the authors of the
software. Like scientists, those authors often have as their ideal the widest
possible dissemination of their software and information about how to use
it, rather than the greatest economic gain. They would like to see the documentation they write distributed freely along with the software.
At other times, though, software authors see documentation as an
afterthought. They would rather not deal with it, and hope that someone
else will. In those cases, the question of compensation often comes into
play. Will a third party who is motivated chiefly by money earn enough
from this book to justify the time writing it?
In helping authors to navigate this discussion, I try to bring them
back to their goal. Is it maximum dissemination of information or is it earning enough to justify the work? I should note that the jury is still out on
whether making the text of a book freely available helps or hurts sales of a
print book. There is evidence on both sides.
In some cases, such as Eric Raymond’s book, The Cathedral and the
Bazaar, free distribution of the content created the ‘buzz’ that allowed us
to publish the same material successfully in print. In other cases, such as
our initial publication of the Linux Network Administrator’s Guide, sales were
reduced because other companies republished some or all of the book at
lower cost, which they could do because they had no development costs
or royalties. However, over time this problem abated, because the fact that
those publishers were not adding value was recognized by the target audience, and eventually marginalized their products.
I see many parallels between the work of free software authors and
the work of scientists. In most cases, both are more interested in making
sure their work is disseminated than in maximizing their return from it. In
most cases, the target reader is a peer of the author. Publishing is designed
to enhance reputation as well as to spread the word. Publishers must be
careful to keep prices fair, lest they be seen as taking advantage of the good
will of their authors, gouging the very customers who also produce their
content.
In this kind of environment, you have to ask about the role of the
publisher as middleman. No one who started as a self-published author and
gradually developed all the infrastructure of publishing (as I did) can question the enormous added value that a publisher brings to the table. This
value includes editing (which starts with content filtering — the choice of
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Information wants to be Valuable
what to publish and what to refuse— and extends through content development and quality control), manufacturing of the physical product, marketing, sales, distribution and collecting and disbursing money.
In the early days of the World Wide Web, the rhetoric was that
anyone could be a publisher. After all, with cheap, ubiquitous web servers,
the cost of printing and inventory was minimized. There was a great deal of
talk of ‘disintermediation’.
In a few short years, the reality has turned out quite otherwise. It is
quite easy to put up a web page, not so easy to discover it. The fundamental
job of publishing is precisely mediation: mediation between a huge class
of potential authors, and an even larger class of potential readers. Simple
mathematics dictates the rise of multi-tiered distribution chains, in which
publishers aggregate authors, various types of resellers aggregate readers,
and wholesalers aggregate publishers for resellers and resellers for publishers. The same multi-tiered distribution has emerged on the web. Betting
on this logic, my company created the first web portal, a site called GNN
(Global Network Navigator) in early 1993. We sold the site to AOL in 1995,
and they later folded it into their main service, but the vision of web aggregators (i.e., publishers) has unfolded pretty much as I imagined it.
Many people with their own web pages end up writing for better-established websites; those sites are further aggregated for readers by
search engines, directories and other portals such as Google, Yahoo! or
AOL. In fact, web publishers now employ full-time workers to ensure that
their pages are listed on these gateway sites, much as publishers of printed
books employ sales people. A large proportion of Internet advertising has
come from websites trying to get better visibility for their product. However, the web does bring another wrinkle: the ability of groups to self-aggregate. The core functions of publishing, from content filtering to audience
aggregation, can be performed by a group of interested users. This is particularly true when there is already a well-defined target community. This
can be a disruptive force in the publishing marketplace. So, for example,
sites such as Cnet and ZDnet spent tens of millions of dollars building and
promoting portals for technical information on the web, while two college
students built a site called Slashdot (“News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.”)
into a similarly powerful market presence simply by inviting their readers
to submit, organize and comment on their own content.
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Interestingly enough, though, as Slashdot has grown in popularity
and evolved into a real business, it has needed to add more editorial staff
to filter the submissions of a growing marketplace of readers who now recognize that exposure via Slashdot is a powerful marketing tool. In short,
even a community-centric effort ends up recreating some of the fundamental dynamics of publisher as middleman and aggregator.
What this evolution illustrates is that publishers will not go away, but
that they cannot be complacent. Publishers must serve the values of both
authors and readers. If they try to enforce an artificial scarcity, charge prices
that are too high or otherwise violate the norms of their target community,
they will encourage that community to self-organize, or new competitors
will emerge who are better attuned to the values of the community.
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Information wants to be Valuable
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Tim O’Reilly Firsts
First book by Tim O’Reilly is “Frank Herbert,” a biography of the Dune Author
First Unix system administration manual (1983)
First book published by O’Reilly, “UNIX in a Nutshell,” published “on spec”
First to use animal covers as designed by Tim’s creative director, Edie Freedman
First to publish a book about the Internet
First to create a “Web portal”
First Web site to sell advertising
First study of Internet demographics
First Perl Conference launched
First Web subscription-based service for technical books
Tim O’Reilly’s Major Contributions
1978
With friend Peter Brajer, forms the custom computer documentation firm of
Brajer, O’Reilly & Associates.
1987
Tim co-authors UNIX Text Processing with Dale Dougherty.
1988
O’Reilly’s X Window System: The Defintive Guide series published. The
series shakes up the computer book publishing industry with professional
books sold at trade discounts.
1988
O’Reilly begins work on “docbook” DTD for SGML and begins evangelizing
publishers about the importance of an open interchange standard for inline
documentation and books.
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1995
Joins the board of Internet Society and the Electronic Frontier Foundation
and begins working actively to promote the importance of open Internet
standards.
1996
Tim battles with Microsoft over non-standard implementation of TCP/IP
and makes national news.
1998
Hosts the Open Source Summit, and puts open source software on the map.
Tim is awarded Infoworld’s Industry Achievment Award for his contributions
to the open source community.
2000
Tim’s battle with Amazon over the 1-click patent makes national news and
encourages debate about software patents and the threat they pose to innovation
and software standards.
2001
Tim Partners with the Pearson Technology Group to form Safari Book Online.
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Isaiah Thomas Firsts
First printer in Worcester, Massachusetts (May 1775)
Contributions and Firsts
Printed first eyewitness accounts of the battles of Lexington and Concord (Massachusetts
Spy, May 3, 1775)
First postmaster in Worcester (May 1775)
Conducted the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence in New England
(Worcester, 1776)
Issued first American type specimen (A Specimen of Isaiah Thomas’ Printing Types, 1785)
Printed and published the first edition of Mother Goose in America (1786)
First master of the Morning Star Masonic Lodge in Worcester (1793)
Established the first paper mill in Worcester (1793)
Printed and published the first American novel (William Hill Brown’s The Power of
Sympathy, 1789)
Was one of the founders of the first bank in Worcester (1804)
Wrote the first history of printing in America (The History of Printing in America, 2 vols.,
1810)
Founded the first national historical organization in the United States (American AntiWquarian Society, 1812)
First person in Worcester to own a coach and livery
Sponsored the first theatrical performance in Worcester
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Isaiah Thomas:
Patriot Printer
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I
Isaiah Thomas: Patriot Printer
saiah Thomas was the foremost printer of the generation that came
of age during the American Revolution. He rose from a poor childhood to become one of the richest men in the new nation. During the
height of his career, his business empire stretched from Massachusetts
to Maryland, and included newspapers, paper mills, printing shops,
binderies, and bookstores. His shrewd business acumen, his dynamic
personality, and his commitment to success guaranteed a legacy that
remains strong and thriving into the twenty-first century. The American
Antiquarian Society, which Thomas founded in 1812, perpetuates his
belief in the importance of the printed word and recognizes the power
contained in the early written records and ephemera of our nation.
Isaiah Thomas was born on January 19, 1749. While Isaiah was
still a young boy, his father deserted the family and fled to the southern
colonies where he is presumed to have died while seeking his fortune.
Facing destitute circumstances with four children to raise, Thomas’s
mother was forced to place him under the care of the overseers of the
poor in Boston. This welfare organization arranged for Isaiah to enter
into an apprenticeship with Zechariah Fowle, who owned a small printing shop in the city. Although the terms of the indenture stated that
Fowle was responsible for Isaiah’s education, Fowle lacked the ability
and resources to adequately educate his apprentice. Isaiah was forced to
learn to read and write by studying an “Ink stained Bible and Dictionary” in the pressroom and by setting type. Isaiah was very bright and
despite these hardships he soon outshone his master in both printing
and business.
At the age of sixteen, Isaiah illegally left his apprenticeship and
set out for London, where he hoped to gain a more thorough knowledge of the printing business. He failed to reach his desired location
and instead landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1765. He stayed in Halifax seven months, finding employment in the only printing shop in
town, owned by Anthony Henry. During his stay in Halifax, he rigorously opposed the British Stamp Act by printing the tax stamp upside
down, creating a woodcut of the devil poking at the stamp, and cutting
all stamps off of his printing paper. This spirited opposition to the
Stamp Act attracted the attention of the local authorities and within
seven months he was forced to flee the province.
After returning briefly to Fowle’s printing shop in Boston, he
again set off for London, this time choosing a more southern route, via
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Wilmington, North Carolina, and Charleston, South Carolina, where he settled for three years to work with a printer named Robert Wells. Thomas
met his first wife, Mary Dill, while in South Carolina and the two were
married on December 25, 1769. Thomas and his wife returned to Boston
in the spring of 1770. Once in Boston, Thomas entered into a partnership
with his old master, Fowle, and established a newspaper for the middling
class entitled the Massachusetts Spy. Thomas’s venture proved so successful that he soon purchased the business from Fowle, including the printing
press that Thomas had learned his craft on, called “Old Number One,” a
press that was to remain with him throughout his life.
Expanding his business in Boston Thomas experimented with other
forms of publishing, including almanacs and magazines. He was aware of
the colonists’ thirst for knowledge and of their dependency on Great Britain to provide a constant supply of materials that would quench such appetites. He envisioned a printing business that would be totally self-sufficient, one that would rely on printers like himself to bring uniquely American products to a rapidly expanding American market.
In the meantime, the Massachusetts Spy soon became one of the
most successful newspapers in America, with a circulation of 3,500. Thomas’s paper became a voice of the Whig, or Patriot, cause, containing the most
fervent anti-British rhetoric of all of the colonial papers. Postriders and ships
carried the newspaper throughout the thirteen colonies, allowing Americans exposure to the growing dissatisfaction with what the Whigs interpreted as the mother country’s increased exploitation of power. Thomas
fueled the discontent by also printing pamphlets and other materials of an
inflammatory nature.
In the spring of 1775, Thomas’s associates, including John Hancock
and Joseph Warren, feared for both his safety and that of his printing shop.
Thomas reported several troubling incidents involving the British authorities in his diary, including: “Indictment for a Libel against Government,”
“I am ordered before the Governor (of the province) and Council,” and
“Conduct of some British Officers to me respecting a piece I had published
of a Court Marital.” Perhaps the most disturbing references were those to
threats of bodily harm such as the following: “Affair at Northcarolina (sic)
– my Newspaper burnt there by the Common hangman – town meeting –
Letter addressed to me – I am there hung and burnt in effigy,” “and conduct of a british Regiment who paraded with a countryman they had tarred
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and feathered…the regiment halted before my house played the rogue’s
march and threatened I should be the next so served.”
Thomas hastily made plans to relocate his enterprise in Worcester, a
town forty miles to the west of Boston. Under the cover of darkness on April
16, 1775, Thomas packed up his press and moved it out of Boston to Worcester. Once in Worcester, he set up his printing press in the basement of Whig
supporter Timothy Bigelow’s house. Three days later the battles of Lexington and Concord occurred and the American Revolution began. The May 3,
1775, issue of the Spy, the first item printed in Worcester, contained one of
the first eyewitness accounts of these battles. During this time Thomas also
printed a document containing depositions taken from colonists in Lexington and Concord supporting the reports of atrocities allegedly committed by
British troops on April 19, 1775. Entitled A Narrative of the Excursion and
Ravages of the King’s Troops, Thomas noted that this was in fact the first
book to be printed in Worcester.
Power of Sympathy: or the Triumph of Nature
Founded in Truth (Boston, 1789)
Thomas printed and published the first
American novel The Power of Sympathy, by
William Hill Brown, in 1789.
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During the early years of the American Revolution Thomas lived
intermittently in Worcester and leased the daily operation of the Spy to first
William Stearns and Daniel Bigelow and then to Anthony Haswell. All of
these gentlemen proved to be poor printers and journalists and the Spy suffered in both quality and subscriptions under their tutelage.
In July 1778 Thomas resumed control of the Spy. From this point
on Thomas would remain in Worcester and in control of the Spy and an
increasing number of other publications and books. Throughout the rest of
the war years his business would fluctuate widely, but after the war it grew
exponentially, reaching its greatest successes in the years 1790 to 1802. In
order to insure the quality of all aspects of the printing process, Thomas
set up a paper mill and bookbinding operation. He had controlling interests
in three newspapers, a magazine, and eight bookstores in Massachusetts,
New Hampshire, New York, and Maryland. At the height of his business,
he operated numerous presses throughout the nation and employed some
150 people in Worcester alone.
As his business prospered Thomas became a very wealthy man. He
purchased a great deal of property in and around Worcester and built a mansion in the town. He also purchased a stately home in Boston and continued to travel back and forth between the two towns when business or pleasure called. He enjoyed showing off his wealth and was the first person in
Worcester to own a coach, which he often used in his travels throughout
New England.
Like many of the founding fathers, Thomas was also extremely
civic-minded. He was an active participant in the Masonic Order and served
as the first Master of the Morning Star Lodge in Worcester. He was the first
postmaster in Worcester, appointed to that post in May of 1775. As transportation flourished in the new nation Thomas was instrumental in surveying
and establishing turnpikes and canals in the area, recognizing the importance of an improved infrastructure to the growth and development of the
young nation. He was also a founder and trustee of the first bank in Worcester. He also enjoyed the theatre, sponsoring the first theatrical performance
in Worcester, and was an original proprietor of the Boston Anthnaeum.
Throughout his life and in his numerous wills, he was very generous to friends, family members, and those less fortunate. Upon his death
he left bequests to so many learned societies, charitable institutions, and
printers’ societies that this portion of his will was printed and circulated as
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a broadside, a fitting means of notifying the recipients of the benevolent
printer’s generosity. He had a reputation for being kind and generous to
his servants, seeking to provide them with the means to better their station in life, as he had so successfully accomplished for himself. Thomas’s
house was always open to family members as well as business associates,
the atmosphere made hospitable by the master of the house and his many
servants.
Thomas’s personal life reveals a more complicated tale. He was married three times. His first marriage to Mary Dill ended in divorce in 1777,
following her affair and subsequent elopement with a British officer. However, the marriage did produce two children, a son named Isaiah and a
daughter, Mary Ann. Both of the children grew to adulthood and produced
many grandchildren. Isaiah attempted to follow his father in the printing
business but met with little success and died from injuries suffered in a
fall at age 45. Mary Ann was a wild and free-spirited woman who married
three times and divorced twice. She and her children were almost always
dependent on Thomas for financial support and he provided for their needs
generously if grudgingly.
Thomas married his second wife, again named Mary, in 1778. This
was a happy union and they lived together until her death at the age of
68. After her death, Thomas wrote in his diary, “I have buried my best
friend and wife, with whom I had lived for 40 years.” In 1819 Thomas took
Rebecca Armstrong as his third wife. She was a cousin and companion of
his second wife but proved to be an unsuitable match for him. The couple
separated after two years of marriage. Thomas devoted his later years to
his scholarship and philanthropy, retiring to the more pleasant company of
friends and books.
Thomas retired from active business pursuits in 1802 to write The
History of Printing in America. This two-volume work was first published
in 1810 and is still considered an important source on early American printers and the publishing industry. After publishing the History of Printing
Thomas determined that he should make available for study all of the
materials that he had utilized in his research by establishing a learned society based on the models of European institutions that had been in existence for hundreds of years. Specifically, Thomas envisioned an institution
would organize materials for study in a methodical manner while striving
to focus on the documents that would tell the story of the early American
nation.
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In 1812, he founded the American Antiquarian Society as a learned
society and library devoted to American history and culture. It was the third
oldest historical society in the country but the first to be truly national in
its scope. In Thomas’s words, “The American Antiquarian Society is, in
some respects, different from all other societies established in the United
States. Membership is restricted to no state, or party. There are no members merely honorary, but all have an equal interest and concern in its affairs
and the objects of this institution, whatever part of the United States they
may reside in. It is truly a national institution. It has no local views nor private concerns. Its objects (to collect and preserve) embrace all time, past
present and future….The benefits resulting…will be increased by time and
will be chiefly received by a remote posterity.”
Thomas was vain, highly intelligent, charming, quick tempered, and
philanthropic. His generosity extended beyond his material wealth. He was
The Royal American Magazine (Boston, 1774)
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The Royal American Magazine was a monthly subscription publication, issued by Thomas to compete with the British magazines that appealed to a
more literary segment of the population. In a brilliant marketing move, Thomas decided to include
installments of Hutchin-son’s History of Massachusetts
in each issue. According to Thomas’s biographer
Clifford Shipton, the installments were printed separately so that they “could be extracted from the
successive numbers of the magazine and bound up
together. The subscribers would obtain the history
and the magazine for less than the regular price
of the history alone.” In addition to Hutchinson’s
history the magazine contained articles on science,
“true confessions” and love stories, and engravings
by Paul Revere and Joseph Callender. The magazine was also the first of its kind in America to publish both the words and music to popular songs.
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Isaiah Thomas: Patriot Printer
genuinely interested in all kinds of intellectual pursuits as is exemplified
by the diverse subjects that he printed in both his newspapers and in his
books. In addition to being a prodigious maker of books, he was also a great
collector and scholar. He amassed an enormous collection of books, pamphlets, broadsides, almanacs, newspapers, and ephemera during this lifetime of collecting. He truly loved the act of accumulating printed materials
and believed that such collections would be of tremendous value to future
scholars and historians.
Almost two hundred years after the founding of the American Antiquarian Society, the mission of the institution remains true to Thomas’s
vision. In this first year of the 21st century, the AAS remains a center for
scholarly research, a place where the history of this great nation, a nation
that Thomas helped mold, is still diligently preserved and studied.
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The American Antiquarian Society, located in
Isaiah Thomas
Award
in Publishing
Worcester,
Massachusetts,
is both an independent
research library and a learned society whose mission is to collect, preserve, and make available the
printed record of what is now the United States
from 1640 through 1876. Founded in 1812 by Revolutionary
War patriot
Isaiahexecutives’
Thomas,
In
early 1963
I wentand
to printer
a printing
conference in Palm Beach. I
the American Antiquarian Society is the third oldest
flew
to
Tampa,
where
I
rented
a
car
to
drive
to
visit my parents in Clermont
historical society in the United States and the first
to
be
national
in
the
scope
of
its
collections.
(in the center of the state).
I especially remember these events because they all form a pattern surrounding that particular visit to Florida. One of the optional trips which was
offered to us while we (“executives”) were there, was to visit the West Palm
Beach Post Times which had just begun to apply a computer to certain of
the tasks associated with typesetting. They were using an RCA 301, a relatively small and inexpensive computer. I went along to see the system at
work, and talked briefly with owner, John Perry, and with Cecil Kelly, the
plant manager. Their computer program accepted unformatted paper tape
input from teletypesetter keyboards and output another paper tape which
contained line-ending decisions, including the splitting or hyphenation of
words, where necessary. This tape was mounted into tape readers on hot
metal linecasting machines and thus improved the productivity of the operation. Moreover, there was a photographic typesetting device, a Photon
513, which was also being driven by paper tape generated via the computer.
And they also showed a computer printout of the line-for-line text which
was used for debugging purposes. As I looked at this operation I suddenly
saw a solution to the problem of photo composition—to produce a printout
for proofreading, and then to insert corrections so that the output from the
phototypesetters would not have to be corrected by cutting and splicing
photographic film after the galleys had been set. I couldn’t get this idea out
of my mind.
And so when I returned to Philadelphia I talked to others about the
notion, and especially to various typesetting employers with whom I was
friendly.
I think most of the typesetters I talked to felt I was a bit crazy. But I
nevertheless contacted the regional sales office of the RCA computer division, where I met Phil Haines, a salesman who caught on to the idea and
agreed to help me with a demonstration project. All that spring I continued to think about the prospects of such venture, however it might be
sponsored, and tried to interest others in it. I thought it would provide a
real benefit to the Philadelphia printing employers. In mid-spring, perhaps
May, we did arrange a demonstration at the RCA facility in Cherry Hill,
showing more or less how such an approach might work, including the generation of a printout, updating the file to include the correction of printers’
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American Antiquarian Society
The American Antiquarian Society
The American Antiquarian Society (AAS) is both a learned society and a
major independent research library. Founded in 1812 by the Revolutionary War patriot and printer Isaiah Thomas, the Society is the third oldest
historical organization in the United States and the first to be national in the
scope of its collections. Membership in the Society is by election and is limited to 700. Thirteen U. S. presidents as well as such luminaries as Daniel
Webster, Henry Clay, Alexander Graham Bell, Ken Burns, Jimmy Carter,
David McCullough, Walter Cronkite, and Daniel Boorstin have been, or are
currently, AAS members. Collectively, AAS members have won 61 Pulitzerprizes.
The AAS library houses the largest and most accessible collection of
books, pamphlets, broadsides, newspapers, periodicals, sheet music, and
graphic arts material printed through 1876 in what is now the United States,
as well as manuscripts and a substantial collection of secondary works, bibliographies, and other reference works related to all aspects of American
history and culture before the twentieth century. The library contains 20
miles of shelves that hold over three million items including two out of
every three books, pamphlets, and broadsides known to have been printed
in this country from the establishment of the first press in 1639 through
1820. The library’s unparalleled graphic arts materials include engravings,
lithographs, sheet music, and maps. In addition, the library owns useful
collections of microform materials including: Early American Imprints
(1639-1819), Early American Newspapers (1690-1820), American city directories through 1860, the Adams Papers, and reference copies of various
manuscript collections of the Society. The Society’s holdings also include
selected modern secondary works and a full array of bibliographical tools,
learned journals, and other aids to research, as well as a collection of sound
recordings and tapes of early American music to supplement its holdings of
printed music.
Scholarship
The exceptional depth of the library’s collections within the fields of
American history and culture through 1876, and the accessibility of those
collections through various finding aids, as well as a highly skilled staff,
make the library a perfect place for in-depth scholarly research. The Society conducts an extensive fellowship program for scholars, artists, and writ-
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ers studying pre-twentieth-century America. Residencies of one month to
one year enable scholars, advanced graduate students, and others to spend
an uninterrupted block of time doing research in the AAS library. Over 358
fellows from 41 states and nine foreign countries have been appointed since
AAS began awarding fellowships in 1972-73.
Support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provide the funding for the Society’s long-term postdoctoral awards. A portion of the Mellon grant allows
a recent PhD. recipient to spend a year at AAS revising his or her dissertation for publication. This Mellon grant also provides funds for other general
long-term fellowships and for a distinguished scholar to spend an academic
year at AAS as Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence.
In addition, numerous short-term fellowships are also available to postdoctoral scholars, Ph.D. candidates, and foreign nationals. In 1994 the Society added visiting fellowships for creative and performing artists and writers. Approximately 20 separate short-term fellowships are awarded each
year.
The writings produced from these fellowships have made substantial
contributions to scholarship. Many have been honored by the prestigious
prizes of the academic world and recognized by their peers as seminal
works in their fields. The 1999 Bancroft Prize was won by Jill Lepore
(Peterson Fellowship 1993-94) for The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the
Origins of American Identity. The 1996 Pulitzer Prize in History and the 1996
Bancroft Prize were awarded to Alan Taylor (AAS-National Endowment for
the Humanities Fellowship 1989-90) for William Cooper’s Town: Power and
Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic.
Work done at the Society over the years has contributed greatly to
the present understanding of the course of American history and culture
from the first contacts between European colonists and Native Americans
until the end of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Research carried out here includes work by such well-known historians and authors of
the past as Esther Forbes, Allan Nevins, Samuel Eliot Morison and David
McCullough and, more recently, by persons conveying historical information through new media, like the documentary filmmakers Ken Burns, who
researched several of his projects at AAS, and Laurie Kahn-Leavitt, who
adapted Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale for the screen.
A key factor in the extraordinary usefulness of the collections has been
the fact that the Society has, from the beginning, consciously set out to col-
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American Antiquarian Society
B
The American Antiquarian Society library houses the largest and most accessible collection of books, pamphlets, broadsides, newspapers, periodicals, sheet music and graphic
arts materials printed through 1876 in what is now the United States, as well as manuscripts and a substantial collection of secondary works, bibliographies, and other reference
works related to all aspects of American history and culture before the twentieth century.
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Isaiah Thomas’s printing press known
as “Old No. 1” (after restoration)
Isaiah learned the trade of printing in Zechariah Fowle’s small
shop in Boston. The press he
learned on was noted in later documents as old “No. 1.” The press
was over six feet tall, approximately three feet wide, and six
feet in length. The supporting
timbers were of elm with pieces
of oak and chestnut also used in
its construction. The platen was
mahogany and all of the hardware
iron. Although the press was large
and heavy, it had to be braced to
the ceiling of the print shop to
prevent the machine from “walking” across the floor while in use.
lect the commonplace and ordinary pieces of printing, not just the first editions written by canonized authors. For this reason, the collections has been
very conducive to the trends in the last generation or two toward intellectual and social history; the history of Native Americans, African Americans,
women, and children; the historical context of past literary production; and
all manner of interdisciplinary pursuits, including American studies and the
history of the book.
The Society’s historic interest in collecting, recording, and interpreting the
output of American printing presses since early colonial days has made it a
center for research on the history of the book. In 1983 the Society established
its Program in the History of the Book in American Culture. This education
and research program involves a number of scholarly activities including a series
of annual lectures, workshops and seminars, conferences, publications and residential fellowships all centered around the history and bibliography of the printing, publication, and dissemination of books and other printed materials in the
geographical areas that became the United States and Canada. Key works in
this field include Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America by Cathy
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Isaiah Thomas Award in Publishing
American Antiquarian Society
N. Davidson (Peterson Fellowship 1984-85); Beneath the American Renaissance:
The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville by David S. Reynolds (AAS-NEH Fellowship1982-83); and Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgement:
Popular Religious Beliefs in Early New England by David D. Hall (AAS-NEH
Fellowship1981-82).
A major component of this program is the preparation of a collaborative,
interdisciplinary work of scholarship entitled A History of the Book in America.
Cambridge University Press, in association with AAS, published the first volume,
The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, in late 1999. When completed, the series
will comprise five volumes, carrying the story up to the recent past.
The Society has been active as a publisher since its earliest years. Its
semiannual learned journal, the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, has been published regularly since 1849. In addition, the Society continues to publish a number of bibliographies and scholarly texts. The Society has also worked with Newsbank/Readex Microprint Corporation to microfilm nearly all the non-serial material published in this country from 1639 to
1820. This pioneer series, entitled Early American Imprints, contains the text in
full of approximately 90,000 books, pamphlets, almanacs, and broadsides.
Program
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The Society sponsors a wide range of programs for constituencies ranging from
school children and their teachers through undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, creative and performing artists and writers, and the
general public. The Society also schedules a wide range of symposiums, lectures, workshops, and conferences on topics dealing with American history and
culture in general and the history of printing, publishing, and reading in America. Every fall semester, AAS sponsors an undergraduate seminar in American
Studies. Students from five Worcester colleges participate in this course held at
AAS and led by a visiting professor.
AAS programs for the general public include reading and discussion
groups, lectures, musical concerts, theatrical presentations and an innovative
radio variety program called The History Show. Each one-hour edition of The
History Show uses the talents of professional actors and musicians and the
resources of the Society to bring to life a single year in American history.
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Isaiah Thomas Award in Publishing
A
A Narrative of the Excursion and Ravages of the King’s Troops (Worcester, 1775)
The original document contains the following inscription, in Isaiah
Thomas’s handwriting: This was the first printing done in Worcester….
This document group contains depositions “taken by order of Congress” to support the reports of the atrocities allegedly committed by
British troops, under the command of General Gage, against colonists
in Lexington and Concord, on April 19, 1775.
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The Society is also committed to enhancing the quality of K-12 education by sponsoring teacher-training workshops and seminars and collaborating
on a number of educational programs that make available for classroom use
primary source materials from the AAS collections. In the winter of 1999 the
Society launched its newest K-12 program, entitled Isaiah Thomas – Patriot
Printer. This highly effective program includes a dramatic presentation and
a facsimile/curriculum packet that examines the extraordinary life of the Society’s founder and his role in establishing the American nation and creating a
uniquely American culture. The curriculum packet includes document facsimiles, graphic images, and background materials from the Society’s collections, as well as lesson plans developed by classroom teachers. The HocheScofield Foundation provided initial support for the Isaiah Thomas – Patriot
Printer project. Additional funding is also now available through grants from the
Colonial Society of America, the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, and the Worcester Arts and Humanities Educational Collaborative.
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Isaiah Thomas Award in Publishing
Rochester Institute of Technology
Internationally recognized as a leader in imaging, technology, fine and
applied arts, and education of the deaf, Rochester Institute of Technology
enrolls 15,000 full- and part-time students in more than 250 career-oriented
and professional programs, many of which are unique and enjoy worldwide
recognition. Its cooperative education program is one of the oldest and
largest in the nation.
For the past decade, U.S. News and World Report has ranked RIT
as one of the nation’s leading comprehensive universities. RIT is also
included in Yahoo Internet Life’s Top 100 Wired Universities, Fisk’s Guide to
America’s Best Colleges, as well as Barron’s Best Buys in Education.
SCHOOL OF PRINTING MANAGEMENT & SCIENCES
Considered the best of its kind in the world, RIT’s School of Printing
Management & Sciences offers four programs in graphic communications.
Part of the nationally accredited College of Imaging Arts and Sciences,
the school offers state-of-the-art equipment and faculty who are worldrenowned experts, teaching printing from concept to inception.
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The DocuTech Manual + Book Factory’s innovative digital book publishing press
offers users a complete end-to-end solution for print-on demand, perfect-bound books.
The solution features the DocuTech 6155 or 6180 digital printer, an in-line roll-tosheet paper feeding system provided by Roll Systems Inc, and an in-line perfect binding and trimming subsystem provided by C. P. Bourg.
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Isaiah Thomas Award in Publishing
Xerox Graphic Arts
Xerox Graphic Arts
Publishing is one of five segments in Xerox’s Graphic Arts Industry
Business, which is leading the industry’s transition from traditional
printing to The New Business of Printing—powerful digital technologies that enable just-in-time, one-to-one and “e” printing solutions.
Xerox invented on-demand digital book production with the introduction of the DocuTech Publisher series. One area of print on demand
that continues to grow is book publishing, where customers are able to
produce short run lengths and personalized books.
More than 1,500 Xerox Graphic Arts professionals worldwide
deliver a portfolio of state-of-the-art digital products, solutions and services that help their customers provide higher value document services and capture new business opportunities. In addition to providing
innovative hardware and software, the Xerox Graphic Arts Industry
Business shares its market-leading digital printing knowledge to help
customers increase their print volume, profit and grow in The New
Business of Printing. Visit the Xerox Graphic Arts Industry Business at:
www.xerox.com/graphicarts.
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PRODUCTION NOTES
Text and cover printed on a Xerox DocuColor 2060 digital color printer
on 32 lb. Brilliant White Navajo text and 80 lb. Winter White
Mohawk Options cover courtesy of Mohawk Paper.
Design and execution of the book, accompanying Web site, and signage
by Amina Rab and Roxanne Stevens
based on a design by Robert Klapka and Sean Morris,
New Media students,
College of Imaging Arts and Sciences, RIT.
The fonts are Adobe Caslon 540 Roman and Italic.
Software used in the production of the print and Web materials
includes Adobe Indesign 1.5, Adobe Illustrator 9.0, Adobe Photoshop 6.0,
and Macromedia Dreamweaver 4.0.
The Isaiah Thomas Award in Publishing Web site is on-line at
http://publish.rit.edu/ITAP.
The Isaiah Thomas Award in Publishing is sponsored by Xerox
Corporation and is presented by the School of Printing Management and
Sciences, College of Imaging Arts and Sciences, Rochester Institute
of Technology, Rochester, NY.
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Dr. Joan Stone
Dean
Professor Frank J. Romano
Administrative Chair
Professor Michael L. Kleper
Paul and Louise Miller Distinguished Professor
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