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Date:      Wed, 23 May 2001 08:35:50 +0930
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
Cc:        David Johnson <djohnson@acuson.com>, Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@toybox.placo.com>, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: [dn-core] Re: Perens' "Free Software Leaders Stand Together"
Message-ID:  <20010523083550.F41189@wantadilla.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <3B0A461C.58A81808@mindspring.com>; from tlambert2@mindspring.com on Tue, May 22, 2001 at 03:57:32AM -0700
References:  <000101c0e0ff$44725600$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> <3B095240.F7873FAD@acuson.com> <3B0A461C.58A81808@mindspring.com>

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On Tuesday, 22 May 2001 at  3:57:32 -0700, Terry Lambert wrote:
> David Johnson wrote:
>>
>> Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>>
>>> Well, I remember paging through that in the bookstore
>>> once, and while I admit I didn't look through all volumes
>>> (they wern't all there) what I remember of it was mainly
>>> reprints of the system manual pages.  Not much to
>>> recommend purchase as the price was rather high.
>>
>> That's what 75% of their X11 series was, and it sold very well.
>>
>> I think the difference is that the X11 series was general
>> to all unices, while the 4.4BSD Lite was specific to a
>> single OS. ORA publishes a lot of Linux books because there
>> is a big market demand for them. But there isn't a big
>> market demand for FreeBSD books. Unfortunate, but true.
>
> They were 4.4BSD books, and they were 4.4BSD-Lite, at a
> time that Lite2 was just about to be released, and had
> been hyped a bunch already.
>
> So they were out of date, and they had stale code (the
> CDROM was a Lite CDROM, published by Usenix).  The 4.4BSD
> code from CSRG was a rather big disappointment, since it
> didn't result in a running system.
>
> So basically, it was stale documentation for broken code,
> which was not entirely relevent to the systems derived
> from that code.
>
> I bought a set of the books, both because I could get a
> full set all at once, and because they were much less to
> carry around than my set of orange Ultrix manuals, which
> they effectively replaced as my "almost applicable to
> FreeBSD" manuals.  It didn't hurt that much of the profit
> was given over in support of Usenix, either.
>
> I'm not really surprised that the books didn't sell that
> well; I'm actually more surprised that they sold as well
> as they did.

The real issue that surprises me is the lack of understanding at
O'Reilly.  As a result of the poor sales of these books, they
concluded that there was no market for any BSD book.

Greg
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