Technology titles live on the usual bell curve. The less sophisticated and expert the audience, the bigger the potential sales. As you go up in expertise titles become increasingly niche - and harder to write well - but potential sales become more limited.
The biggest sellers were always mass-market guides to Windows, OS X, Word, iOS, and such.
The next tier down were introductory guides to core topics - HTML/CSS, js, Java, Flash, VisualBasic, and on on.
The tier down from that was much more specific - e.g. sound on iOS - but only of interest to a relatively small audience.
Eventually publishers hit a point where they can't find good expert authors because the money for writing a book is so poor compared to a typical developer salary, and the amount of work so high, that no one wants to do it. And even if they do they probably need a lot of help with editing and formatting.
StackOverflow and other online sources have more or less wiped out the lower levels. Changes in the industry have wiped out the upper levels - hardly anyone needs an introduction to Windows now, and even an intro to HTML/CSS is much harder to sell than it used to be.
That leaves the niche-y, limited, specialised levels - which aren't big enough on their own to support the old publishing model, except as a cottage industry.
Aside from author advances, the production costs of a book don't depend on the technical level of the content.
So this is why the industry is struggling. Meanwhile lynda.com, Udemy, and other courseware are cleaning up in the same space.
So of course O'Reilly, Wiley, and the rest are going to try to make a play for that space. And IMO they will fail, because the costs of producing courseware are much higher than the costs of producing a book, the courseware business requires an even more specialised skill set, the market isn't huge anyway - and more than anything, they're late to the party.
The biggest sellers were always mass-market guides to Windows, OS X, Word, iOS, and such.
The next tier down were introductory guides to core topics - HTML/CSS, js, Java, Flash, VisualBasic, and on on.
The tier down from that was much more specific - e.g. sound on iOS - but only of interest to a relatively small audience.
Eventually publishers hit a point where they can't find good expert authors because the money for writing a book is so poor compared to a typical developer salary, and the amount of work so high, that no one wants to do it. And even if they do they probably need a lot of help with editing and formatting.
StackOverflow and other online sources have more or less wiped out the lower levels. Changes in the industry have wiped out the upper levels - hardly anyone needs an introduction to Windows now, and even an intro to HTML/CSS is much harder to sell than it used to be.
That leaves the niche-y, limited, specialised levels - which aren't big enough on their own to support the old publishing model, except as a cottage industry.
Aside from author advances, the production costs of a book don't depend on the technical level of the content.
So this is why the industry is struggling. Meanwhile lynda.com, Udemy, and other courseware are cleaning up in the same space.
So of course O'Reilly, Wiley, and the rest are going to try to make a play for that space. And IMO they will fail, because the costs of producing courseware are much higher than the costs of producing a book, the courseware business requires an even more specialised skill set, the market isn't huge anyway - and more than anything, they're late to the party.