Imitation is the Saddest Form of Flattery
After the war, Toyota revolutionized the way cars were built, first with their ideas of Just in Time inventory, and later by pushing control down to teams on the floor, capitalizing on the agility that enabled.
Detroit manufacturers noticed this, and sent representative to Toyota to see just how they did this. These invited spies brought back copious notes on what they saw, the the auto makers set about copying the Toyota process. Without exception, these early attempts at imitation failed: the car companies replicated what they saw Toyota doing, but only on the surface. They didn’t really understand what was behind these practices. It was like trying to become an artist by copying the angle and velocity of the brush held by a master.
Andy and I have tried to think differently about publishing. We came to it knowing nothing about the industry. We did, however, know how to make projects work. So we took what we knew and applied the principles, if not the practices, to what we did.
- To my knowledge, we’re the only publisher to keep all our books under source control, and give authors access to their portion of the repository.
- We’re (I think) the only publisher where the author edits the actual material that gets typeset, so we can make changes right up to the day we go to press.
- We’re the only publisher to have continuous build systems for our books, so authors can see what they’ve just written, typeset as for the final book.
- We’re the only publisher to give authors monthly royalty statements (soon to be real-time), and quarterly royalty checks.
- We’re the only publisher to pay 50% royalties.
- We’re the only publisher where you can record an erratum for a page in the PDF you’re reading by clicking a link on that page.
- We pioneered the concept of the Beta Book, where you can get access to a book as it evolves, and then get the final copy when it’s available. Other publishers did have chapter-by-chapter programs, but our production system allows us to update the whole book, all the time.
- We pioneered the idea of Fridays, small, inexpensive, PDF-only books on focused topics.
According to the feedback we get, we’ve caused something of stir in the publishing industry.
And it’s no surprise that other publishers do what the car companies did to Toyota. They try to copy. Just this month I’ve heard of two publishers who’ll be running beta-book programs (even, somewhat lamely, calling them Beta Books). And I just heard that a well-known technical publisher might be launching a series of cheap, PDF-only, books. (Perhaps they’ll call them Thursdays to show some originality.)
As the Toyota example showed, this kind of surface-level imitation is flattering, but ultimately it’s unlikely to succeed.
Behind the stuff that you see us doing, there’s an underlying philosophy and set of practices. They all reinforce each other. For example, the fact we have continuous builds and author-typesetting means we can create beta books that are living documents. The fact we have an errata system hyperlinked from these beta book pages means we can put feedback in the hands of our authors, and hence we can get updated revisions out faster. Each of these aspects of what we do is a small thing in isolation, but we have hundreds of them, and they all add up to a cohesive, and we feel revolutionary, whole. Copying just the visible aspects misses this depth.
For this reason, I honestly don’t mind other publishers blatantly ripping us off. But I’d rather they didn’t. Instead, I’d rather they found their own ways of innovating, and build their own ideas that others found useful. The publishing industry is in transition. It needs all the good ideas it can get. All publishers should contribute in their own way to the reshaping of the industry. Simply aping someone else’s success won’t help the community as a whole.
Comments