Books as Documentation: The Wheel Turns?

I recently heard through the grapevine about a deal done by one of my competitors, in which they are "publishing" a book for which most of the copies are bought and distributed by the vendor. Now vendor buybacks are nothing new, but the rumored scale of this deal reminded me of the ways things were back in the 80's, before the huge expansion of the computer book market made companies think they could dispense with publishing documentation altogether. (Hence the Missing Manual.)

It could be that the wheel is turning. I actually started O'Reilly as a technical documentation consulting company, and in our early publishing efforts, sales to corporations of books to replace their internal documentation efforts were a huge part of our business. This was particularly true with the X Window system, where the O'Reilly X series became the de-facto documentation for virtually every workstation vendor. I still remember one X Consortium meeting (maybe around X11 R3), where one of the members raised the question of documentation, and Bob Schiefler, the director of the consortium, said "Don't worry. I'm sure O'Reilly will take care of it."

Companies realized they could save a boatload by having an external vendor develop a high quality manual set that was also sold as a commercial book, which they could then purchase and distribute to their customers. But then, as the retail computer book market boomed, companies realized they could save even more money by not offering a manual at all and sending their customers to the bookstores. But in the past few years, the chains have cut their computer book sections way back. Now publishers are in turn coming to grips with the new reality, that many books that used to sell well are no making them any money, so why should the vendors be getting a free ride? We've increasingly been having conversations with major vendors (and not just small wannabes) who want to see books published on their products, but are being told by publisher after publisher, "no way, unless you commit to a major buyback." In short, companies will have to go back to investing in their own documentation.

And the fact is, that partnering between software vendors and publishers is a great way to get top quality documentation done. Some of our best work at O'Reilly has come when we could start with internal documentation (specs, for example) written by truly knowledgeable insiders, and then add to that our outsider's insight into what the reader really needs to know, our organizational and editing skills, integration of practical knowledge gleaned through technical reviews by outside experts, and a dash of marketing savvy. It's a bit like a relay race. A team passing the baton at just the right time can outperform any individual contributor.

Back to memory lane: My very first public "op ed", from October 1984, was entitled Documentation and the Future of Unix, and in it, I described the need for three manuals in addition to the standard Unix doc set. I went on to develop these three books in conjunction with one of my clients at the time, the Massachusetts Computer Corporation (Masscomp). They were first published as Masscomp documentation, and only later became bestselling books: Learning the Unix Operating System, Essential System Administration, and Unix in a Nutshell.