I was just having a chat with one of my teammates about O’Reilly’s “Hacks” books. I want to like these books — I love the idea of hacking; I love the idea that their coverage spans from SQL Hacks to Tivo Hacks to Statistics Hacks to Mind Hacks…
But the execution has never yet seem to hit. From looking at the contents alone, from the time they assemble 75-100 hacks for a single topic, there is a pretty small portion that I think would be of interest to any single person. I may well be wrong, but it seems like these call for a new kind of delivery mechanism.
They should be for sale like iTunes tracks, fifty cents or a buck a pop, PDF download, no DRM. Honor System. I don’t know if they could make any money off of that, but it seems like a better fit to me. As books, they average about thirty bucks a pop, and even for the topics I like, I haven’t yet felt like the net of useful hacks would make that a worthwhile purchase. They must be doing pretty well, though — there are 62 of them by my count!
This post is another case for this identifier thing I’ve been going on about. It seemed more correct to link to O’Reilly’s pages for these books, but any smart browser interface that might provide general use by knowing that I was linking to books has nothing to “grab on to”… Almost better to link to a URL that embeds an ISBN, like Amazon or LibraryThing, but that’s not the way they structure their site.
