O'Reilly Book Proposal

In Early 1999, I decided that it might be fun to write technical books. I like to learn new technology, and I like to write, so it seemed like this might be a decent thing to do for money. At the time the technology I had been playing with was Java programming - so I decided to write a Java 2 Certification book - but the at the same time my good friend Alex Marsh mentioned he was interested in writing a Solaris certification book - so I agreed to do it with him in hopes that we could end up doing a series of Sun Certification books including the various levels of Java certification being offered..

O'Reilly books had been one of the first publishers on the scene in the tech book market - and I had read a few of their books. Their gimmick of putting a different animal on the cover of each book had got them noticed originally, and since then Tim O'Reilly had been touted as a tech savant, guru, and hero for Unix and the open source movement. O'Reilly had already published its first Microsoft Certification book - so it seemed natural that they would be interested in publishing certification books for the leading commercial UNIX product.

Apparently not.

We submitted this proposal to Oreilly books, and one of their editors jumped on it and met with us right away. He thought that it would be a great book - and that we would be good people to write it. However, he later informed us that he could not get go a ahead for the project.

I was persistent, and eventually found out that Tim Oreilly himself had killed the book. I sent him email asking him why - expressing my curiosity that he was publishing Microsoft Certification books but not Sun. He responded saying that he didn't like certification books in general - and thought that it was a fad that would die out in six months to a year.

Writing this in 2002 - shelf space on certification books in bookstores now accounts for about 20% of all computer books - all other major tech book publishing companies have Sun certification books. O'reilly - however - has only ever published Microsoft certification books - publishing at least 2 more of these even after Tim said they would not be doing any more certification books.

Very strange...