What good is a publisher in the Age of the Net?

Publishers must have the following characteristics to remain profitable in the Net Era:

• Quality Assurance -- when you buy an O'Reilly title, you are expecting factually correct information presented in a no-nonsense style, a few bits of geek humor, and a decent table of contents, index, and so forth.
  
• Convenience -- the publisher has to put the data into convenient media, be that hardcopy, an optical disk, an updated website.
  
• Content filtering -- as appropriate for the brand: if this is schlock horror, it had better be good schlock horror. If this is an SF brand, the slush should not be floating to the top. Publishers provide a degree of pre-filtering so that only the good stuff is brought to your attention.
  
• Reasonable pricing -- it doesn't really matter if all the other criteria are maxed out; if I can't afford the product, I can swap time for money and go trawling through the Net myself for the information or entertainment I want.
  

Software, music, movies, literature -- all the same. They really only differ in the scale of the number of people and cost of equipment needed to produce the final draft. It's all expression of talent.

What good is a publisher in the Age of the Net?

Publishers must have the following characteristics to remain profitable in the Net Era:

• Quality Assurance -- when you buy an O'Reilly title, you are expecting factually correct information presented in a no-nonsense style, a few bits of geek humor, and a decent table of contents, index, and so forth.
  
• Convenience -- the publisher has to put the data into convenient media, be that hardcopy, an optical disk, an updated website.
  
• Content filtering -- as appropriate for the brand: if this is schlock horror, it had better be good schlock horror. If this is an SF brand, the slush should not be floating to the top. Publishers provide a degree of pre-filtering so that only the good stuff is brought to your attention.
  
• Reasonable pricing -- it doesn't really matter if all the other criteria are maxed out; if I can't afford the product, I can swap time for money and go trawling through the Net myself for the information or entertainment I want.
  

Software, music, movies, literature -- all the same. They really only differ in the scale of the number of people and cost of equipment needed to produce the final draft. It's all expression of talent.