Hey Tim,

Have you ever thought about publishing some books for a younger audience? I just got through with Learning Perl, and I remember back when I was eight years old and struggling through BASIC books for the TRS-80. They were so poorly written that I never got very far, but Learning Perl got me to a level where I could do some good stuff really quickly. Now that I'm learning Perl Tk, I think about what a great combo that would have been way back when. I don't think Learning Perl is going to be really accessible to 10-12 year olds, but I think a series of small texts that are very slow and patient would be well received by kids, parents, and educators. I don't know if Perl is the right language, but it sure does a good job of making powerful programs an easy task, and it's free, so the whole kit might appeal to schools. What do you think?

Regards,
Brian

Hi Brian,

Several publishers have made a run at writing computer books for younger kids. None of them have been particularly successful.

One issue is that most of the younger kids who want to get into programming have a knack for it and can learn just fine from the books written for adults. Heck, they probably need books less than older folks since they've grown up absorbing information from the Web and other online sources. Just check out the average age of the jabber.org team (several of them are still in high school) or some of the people working on Freenet! For that matter, check out Aaron Swartz, not yet 15 and a key member of the RDF Core Working Group, the Dublin Core Architecture Working Group, coeditor of the RSS 1.0 spec, and so on. I just met Aaron at the O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer and Web Services Conference in Washington D.C.; he can hold his own with hackers twice his age. Or consider Arik Vardi, one of the creators of ICQ. His father, Yossi Vardi, says that Arik once told him that discovering O'Reilly books was the second best thing that happened to him, after dropping out of high school.

It's often younger developers who have key insights that turn old paradigms on their heads. ICQ preceded Napster as the first major service to break the client-server paradigm of the Web with a radically distributed architecture. (Admittedly, Arik was in his mid-twenties by the time he developed the ICQ protocol.)

The other issue is that specialty markets just aren't that big, certainly not big enough to support the kind of retail strategy that is currently used to sell most computer books. The average computer book sells somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 copies. (Yes, there are many exceptions, but the great majority are actually at the lower end of that range.) So you take a topic and aim it at a small fraction of the audience, and suddenly, you're not talking about an economically viable product. The idea of computer books for kids, computer books for women, computer books for seniors, seems to "come round again on the guitar" every few years (as Arlo Guthrie said in Alice's Restaurant), but nobody yet has made it work.

It's ironic that I should say this, because of course we made our name at O'Reilly doing what everyone else considered small-market books that were too narrow to be viable. But there's a big difference between a must-have book for a narrow but deep market and one that's aimed at a broad, shallow market.

Marketing is a bit like making a fire. You can make a small one or a big one, but the principle is the same: You want to concentrate the heat to get things going and spread out the coals if you want to put it out. There's this great line about marketing, which I think came from Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm (though I'm not sure of this): "A market is a group of customers who reference each other when making buying decisions." So, for example, people who care about a narrow topic like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese information processing will refer each other to Ken Lunde's book, making it viable even at a low level of sales. But kids who care about computers aren't a concentrated market in the same way. A few thousand people who share the same mailing lists and professional societies may support a very successful book, whereas a few thousand people who have no regular way of being in touch just won't be able to do the same.

Tim

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