Date: August, 1999
Subject: Why Travel and Medical books?

O'Reilly is so well known as a computer book publisher that people are often surprised when they see books on travel and health topics on our list. We've tended not to feature these books here on our main site, instead giving them their own homes, at http://www.travelerstales.com and http://www.patientcenters.com, and linking to them only via the small "affiliates" link at the bottom of our home page.

I was thinking about this recently and realized that we were doing both our customers and our affiliated companies a disfavor by giving these other product lines such a low profile. After all, even programmers get out of their cubicles from time to time, and often travel for business or pleasure. And everyone gets sick, but isn't always happy with the medical care they get!

As a result, I decided it would be a good idea to feature news about our travel and medical books on our home page. But before doing that I want to say a bit more about what our books in these other areas 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.

That's why our computer books have made such an impact on the industry. Unlike many other publishers, who do books only when something is already widely accepted, we have tended to document stuff that was somewhere out on the edge--new, off the beaten path, but important over the long run.

As a result, we wrote books about UNIX and the Internet when no one else did, and we were one of the earliest popularizers of the web (our treatment of it in The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog and our subsequent work on GNN is said to have sparked the Mosaic project), and were instrumental in raising public awareness about the collection of technologies that are now collectively referred to as Open Source.

We do books that we think are needed, not just books that we think will be bestsellers. And of course, because people like to buy books that are useful, a fair number of those "necessary" books have ended up being bestsellers after all. Doing the right thing has had a great payoff, and we've been far more successful than we ever expected.

So we started thinking about how we could apply this philosophy in other areas.

We picked travel as our first spinoff area not because we thought it was necessarily the "best" area to pursue for business reasons, but, like a lot that we do, because of serendipity: my brother James was a professional travel writer. (There are two things that are absolutely required in order to create good books: 1) important subjects, and 2) someone who knows what they are talking about. We don't start a project till we have both.)

James and I started the business when we realized how different his experiences were, as a professional travel writer, from the experiences typically written up in guidebooks and newspaper travel stories. And when I started to travel myself, I saw just how inadequate those guidebooks were to give you a real sense of where you were going. Because the kind of nitty-gritty documentation O'Reilly tended to do for computer topics was already available from guidebook publishers like Lonely Planet, we realized that what was missing was the context, not the details. Guidebooks turn into numbing laundry lists of hundreds or thousands of things to see and do, when you have no idea what you *ought* to be seeing or doing.

What was needed was the kind of guidance you get from people who've been there ahead of you. In this particular case, we realized that the best way to give that guidance was in the form of stories--the adventures of the guy from the next cube, if you will. :-)

But more than that, we saw a "big picture" issue: as tourism becomes the world's #1 industry, it's important to learn how to do it right, to travel lightly, with eyes open to what's different and special about the places we go. Our goal with Travelers' Tales was simple: to make people better travelers, much as our computer books try to make them better programmers, or webmasters, or system administrators.

And so the award-winning Travelers' Tales series was born. This series captures the piquant, the mind-expanding, the heart-touching, and even the hair-raising side of travel, and prepares you better than any other kind of book for immersion in a new world. We have country and city guides, as well as more topical collections such as A Woman's World and The Road Within. (Hint: If you're from Silicon Valley, Travelers Tales: San Francisco will give you a view of the city that will surprise, delight, and encourage you to go north at the first opportunity.)

As we've done many times at O'Reilly, we created a new publishing category as well. Many bookstores now sport expanded "travel literature" sections in addition to their guidebook sections, and other publishers have jumped into the market with copycat offerings.

As time went on, we realized that there were niches for more purely "tutorial" books as well, such as our recent bestseller The Penny Pincher's Passport to Luxury Travel. Despite the title, this isn't just a book for cheapskates. It's an incredible guide for anyone who travels, a tutorial on how to get the best service, room upgrades, and other benefits that experienced travelers receive all the time. In short, it's a book just like our computer book classics, the inside scoop from someone who has figured out how to do something hard, and make it look easy.

Our Patient Centered Guides have a similar history. Medical information had always seemed to me to be a classic case of the "information gap" I talked about above. There is a huge amount of information, and a class of people (doctors and other industry professionals) who have it. But they don't often do a great job of sharing it with people who want it (patients). That's a recipe for what I like to call "information pain", and so I was on the lookout for an author to help us get started. That came in an unexpected way.

My best friend from high school, Nancy Keene, was a former paramedic and outstanding patient advocate. When her daughter was diagnosed with leukemia, Nancy spent several years extracting every last ounce of information and care out of the medical system. After pulling Katie through the ordeal, Nancy wanted to write a book about it, to help other parents facing the same life-threatening problem.

Fortunately, O'Reilly editor Linda Lamb was also extremely interested in this area. They teamed up to develop that first book, on Childhood Leukemia. (An interesting aside about this book, which illustrates something about O'Reilly's publishing philosophy. There are only about 3000 cases a year of childhood leukemia--hardly a market that will make a bestseller. But if you're faced with this terrible problem, you need information just as badly as one of the hundreds of thousands of people struck down with more widespread diseases. Our sales figures illustrate just how successful the book is: we sell over 2000 copies a year, and people on internet mailing lists devoted to childhood leukemia simply refer to it as "Nancy's book.")

After Nancy and Linda worked out the template for the series, we started looking for more topics: medical conditions where having the right information can really make a difference.

The books contain a mix of stories from people who've actually been there ahead of you, and practical medical information that tells you what your options are, and what to do about them. The authors are classic O'Reilly authors--people who have mastered their topic in the real world. Watching Gary Karp, author of Life on Wheels, get into or out of his car with his wheelchair is a lot like watching Larry Wall solve a problem using Perl. You can't believe it could look so easy!

As a way to introduce you to our travel and medical book lines, for this month only, we're offering any Travelers' Tales or Patient Centered Guides book at 50% off to anyone who orders at the same time as they order one of our computer titles. If you take this offer, you'll have to reference code W9TIM when you place your order.

--Tim

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