From: Jim Hill
To: ask_tim@oreilly.com
Subject: Why not "pull" outdated books?
Tim:
I have thought of this question several times before, but a recent book-hunting expedition has finally motivated me to ask:
Why do you not yank certain books from the market when their content becomes sufficiently outdated as to render the book effectively useless? Failing that, why not a slashing of the price?
The canonical example would be the Linux Network Administrator's Guide. The first and thus far only edition celebrates its 5th birthday this month (Jan2k) and while its contents aren't incorrect, they don't offer much to the Linux user of today. Setting up your SLIP account or UUCP on a local LAN have become superfluous, while PPP is barely mentioned--and DHCP, SAMBA, IPv6, the firewalling code and so forth are nowhere to be found (for obvious reasons).
We all await the second edition of the NAG (and I have a vague recollection of seeing someone from ORA allude to the in-progress development of that), but in the meantime, the first edition is still on shelves--and still being sold at the cover price. I hate to seem like a crank, but there's nowhere near enough relevant content in the 370 pages to justify a $29.95 pricetag. There's barely enough relevant content to justify a purchase at all.
So what gives? Has there been discussion at ORA in the past of recycling books that are overtaken by industry developments? If the continued cover-price sales of the book are by conscious choice rather than inertia, how does ORA make that decision, and how do you square it with your otherwise spectacular publishing practices?
Jim
Jim,
A new edition of the NAG is indeed in the works. We expect to see it released in June 2000.
Your point about pulling outdated books seems like a good idea from the outside, but when we've done it on a couple of books, we've encountered a firestorm of protest. For example, we took the first edition of CGI Programming with Perl out of circulation (a new edition is due in June), and have had countless protests from retailers who had customers desperate to buy the book. There became almost a black market in the book, with people scouring the market and passing them around. We ended up digging up damaged returns from our warehouse to sell.
At the end of the day, customers decide whether or not they get enough benefit from a book. Usually, an older copyright date will put them off, but if they think the book is still worth having, they'll buy it, and as long as they do so in quantities sufficient for retailers to keep ordering them, we try to keep up with demand.
Still, we do recognize that as our list of titles gets ever longer, that it's harder to keep updating our old books. We're a long way from the days when we updated books every six months! But we're working on it, and we are refreshing many older books, and are getting some editors devoted almost exclusively to keeping older books up to date.
--Tim
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