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Greetings.
I happen to have the good fortune to have my name on several O'Reilly books. Last week, in a fit of temporary insanity, I sent the following (slightly edited) email to some of my editors at O'Reilly, with a Cc: to Tim O'Reilly himself. (Tim and I have never met, and only corresponded a few times.)
> Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 15:58:50 +0300
> From: Aharon Robbins <arnold@skeeve.com>
> Subject: bizarre publishing ideas
>
> As an indicator of my severe lack of sleep recently (or severe
> amounts of stress, however you want to look at it), here are some
> bizarre publishing ideas. Guaranteed to be instant hits!
>
> 1. O'Reilly books on tape! Inspired by listening to my wife read
> "Harry Potter" to the kids, and my own enjoyment of various
> "The Cat Who ..." tapes, why not record the various "in A Nutshell"
> books? You can charge extra for the ones read by the actual authors.
>
> Just imagine the popularity of chapter 2 in Unix in a Nutshell.
>
> "EMM VEE dash C dash P dash R file one optional files destination
> directory. This command moves files from one name to another or...."
>
> We can sell it as a cure for insomnia. Or just think, it'll be a great
> way to thin the population in Silicon Valley as all the nerds
> fall asleep at the wheel on the way into work and die in car accidents.
>
> Or just imagine the books on vi and/emacs as the author soothingly
> reads the tables of command keys ... ZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzz ....
>
> [ ..... ]
>
> Arnold
Tim's reply (included here by permission), truly suprised me:
> Date: Wed, 02 May 2001 09:19:42 -0700
> From: "Tim O'Reilly" <tim@oreilly.com>
> Organization: O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
> Subject: Re: bizarre publishing ideas
>
> Aharon Robbins wrote:
> [ ... see above ]
>
> Actually, I have REALLY wanted to do this as a community-originated free
> download in MP3 kind of thing. While not every chapter would make great
> reading, a lot can be gained.
>
> I've imagined seeding the download area with a few good starts--a
> chapter of Programming Perl read by Larry Wall, a chapter of Perl
> Algorithms read by Jon Orwant, etc. I'd be happy to read a chapter or
> two from anything I've written. But the idea then was just to have our
> customers make mp3s and upload.
>
> We've never quite gotten anyone to take the bit in their teeth, though.
>
> Audio versions of our books is a very frequent 'ask tim' request.
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