Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1998 11:07:32 -0700 (PDT) From: Lisa Mann <lisam@oreilly.com> To: cool@eklektix.com Subject: UNIX Nutshell Cracks Half-mMillion Mark For immediate release For more information contact: Lisa Mann (707) 829-0515 ext. 230 lisam@oreilly.com UNIX in a Nutshell Cracks a Half Million Copies in Print While Windows 98, antitrust actions, and all things Microsoft continue to dominate headlines, the UNIX operating system keeps quietly and ubiquitously driving Web hub servers and corporate networks. Despite prevailing wisdom heralding the demise of UNIX, the venerable operating system seems to be not only holding but actually gaining ground. It's in the numbers. UNIX sales climbed a higher-than-expected 20% this past year. "UNIX In a Nutshell" -- the first book published in the popular In a Nutshell series -- marked a milestone last month, surpassing 500,000 copies in print plus six years on the Publishers Weekly computer book bestseller list. This title has achieved incredible staying power seldom seen among computer books. "UNIX is not sexy or hot or new, but our book remains a bestseller," observes Tim O'Reilly, founder and president of O'Reilly & Associates. "UNIX can be a little bit obscure and inconsistent, and it's also very terse. Even experienced users are always having look things up," says Frank Willison, O'Reilly's editor-in-chief of technical publications. "This book lasted this long because our goal is to give users everything they need to know about UNIX ... and nothing more. For some people, this is the only book on UNIX they have. It was designed to be a reference book to keep on one's desk." Indeed, says the author of the book's second edition, now a contract technical writer in Silicon Valley, "it's amazing how many times I see that book on people's shelves here in the Valley." A former O'Reilly editor and staff writer, Gilley is pleased to report that when people find out he it, "the feedback I get is always very positive. I've heard anything negative." Meanwhile, other early O'Reilly books, including "Learning the UNIX Operating System" and "Learning the vi Editor", have also sold hundreds of thousands of copies, with continued strong sales -- even fourteen years after their original publication. In an industry filled with books whose shelf life is counted in months, O'Reilly's UNIX titles are the envy of every computer book publisher. The Collaborative UNIX Evolution While competing operating systems were designed by individual companies, UNIX evolved in the technical community. Because its source code was widely available to universities, thousands of individual developers contributed features and utilities that solved specific problems, often in new and unexpected ways. The resulting system is incredibly powerful, versatile, and robust. This same collaborative, evolutionary approach to system design also led to the development of TCP/IP and many of the key Internet technologies. It's no surprise that O'Reilly's books on Internet technologies, such as DNS and Bind and TCP/IP Network Administration, are perennial bestsellers, with hundreds of thousands of copies in print. Although open development of UNIX itself was choked off in the mid-1980's by AT&T's rigid licensing, the ferment collaborative development moved on to Linux and Berkeley UNIX derivatives such as FreeBSD. These operating systems continue to be reinvented and built upon by programmers, administrators, and computer scientists around the world. Utilities that began as contributions to UNIX, such as Perl, have taken on a life of their own and are now central not only to UNIX administration but to the Web and, increasingly, even to closed systems such as NT as a way to get around those systems' limitations. Getting Under the Hood The open, malleable quality of "open source" technologies is fertile ground for the kind of books that O'Reilly publishes-- books that give users the power to "get under the hood"and make changes. "UNIX in a Nutshell boils down the subject to the kind of information that's looked up again and again, even by experienced users," Tim O'Reilly observes. "When the demand for these compact reference books became clear to us, we started building on the success of UNIX In a Nutshell, using the same 'fat-free' format to produce books on other topics." Many titles in the Nutshell series -- most notably "Java in a Nutshell" and "Windows NT in a Nutshell"-- became instant bestsellers, and they show every sign of having the same kind of staying power. New titles, such as "Windows 95 in a Nutshell", "Photoshop in a Nutshell", and even "AOL in a Nutshell", give users of proprietary operating systems and applications the same kind of deep, practical information that O'Reilly offered the UNIX world. What further differentiates the In a Nutshell series is the $19.95 price tag. Most computer sell for twice as much, yet they have a far shorter shelf life. "The vast majority of computer books out there are fly-by-night," Tim asserts. "They're rushed to market to capture the first wave of interest in a new product, and they're often incredibly superficial. Forty dollars for a book you can use for only a few weeks is not a good value." Responding to Real Needs The popular In a Nutshell series fills a need overlooked by other publishers who are beholden to the fast-moving computer industry's high rate of product change. "One of the failures of the rest of the computer publishing industry is that they tend to respond to the obvious big trends," Tim observes. "The latest and greatest stuff gets all attention. But we've always tried to listen to the people who are in the trenches so that we can provide what they need." ###