Liu Tianbei "tells me what books you read, I can guess which kind of person you are." The French said this. This is also applicable to software developers: John Wiley's readers of red book spinal title textbooks, a lot of students; see SAMS 21 days series, most of them are a beginners who have a gun; for software engineering or C specialist In terms of ADDISON WESLEY, several series of readings are preferred reference books. Wrox, a professional publishing house in the UK, is also regarded this market segment. Their slogan is "programmers to write books". That's right, every Leisi's cover is a large photo of a plurality of authors. Looking at the foot of the frame, the authority of the frame, the reader seems to have been directly guided by the top programmer. With this visual strategy, Wrox also built a variety of professional developer forums and communities, authors, and readers, and the brand's cognition, and the customer's cohesiveness has benefited a lot. In the past few years, Wrox books have been raw to the best-selling racks of professional bookstores. The programmers have even be happy to use "7 people", "4 people" refer to the most famous number of the most famous - the large photos on the red cover have been Wrox The community is deeply rooted. A number of publishing agencies in China have introduced the book in recent years, and Wrox has received more and more attention from Chinese developers with an elegant Chinese name "Leith". Therefore, when the WROX community content is stopped, the publisher's closed message is open when the developer is in the middle of March, and the developers can not help but be awkward. When people miss my "IT", "Leith", when I miss my head or 4 people, and actually affect the publisher. But can I really blame the year this time? I have viewed my reading records for a few years, and I realized that the recent Wrox book did lose the essential role in the past. Reflecting the decline of Wrox, there are similar reflections in foreign professional communities: their book is too thick, too mixed, too much repetition. Wrox is very least published by an introduction or principles, most of the topics focus on specific development platforms, languages, tools, and fields. But the title of a lot of works is getting narrower (such as a special "Mysql Data Replication"), but the content is uncommon, often in a large number of basic knowledge introduction (such as the "XML and database" almost All aspects of XML are covered, it can be used alone as a large use of XML). The most depressed thing is that Wrox's covert trends have also emerged - there is a 19 author avatar on "professional J2EE". I still remember my first time to pick up this thickness of 1632: This more monster's share is enough to make me proud of ancient warriors with the master of the beast. The book is too thick, it can only be a dictionary; there are too many contents, readers in special fields are difficult to get the required knowledge; a book has too many authors, or explain it is a warehouse, or indicate the topic Inappropriate: If a topic wants 19 experts to explain, why do the reader have to cover this whole field? These principle publishers should know the name. After Wrox overturned, the authors had gradually exposed the disadvantages of the social publication mechanism. "Wrox closed, I am relieved," A senior author participated in 3 books said, "Editor will only give you 10 days to let you write a chapter, and they don't know how to say the whole book. What! "Many should work together. Some authors don't have a deep technology and writing skills. They use them to say to the book, and the publisher will advise an unrealistic print and a considerable royalty and induce them. In the case of poor sales, some authors are Wrox's income or even less than 2 per hour. There is no doubt that similar practices are dual betrayal of the author and readers, and there is also a pro-line for Wrox original "programmers".
With its root cause, 1992 Wrox was established in Birmingham, England, the name should be from the homonym of English "Rocks". The same belongs to the parent company, this closes of the Friends of ED Press, which is also a famous artistic design book profession publisher, business ideas and Wrox, and books for designers. As a local small-scale publisher, Wrox and Friends Of ED can be in the middle of Macmillan (Sams, Que's parent company), Pearson Education (Addison Wesley's parent company), and a place in the turbulence published in IT, High quality brands are the most important weight. The online tide at the end of the 1990s pushed their ASP and PHP series tutorials to sell the peak: When people rushed to the bookstore, they got effective in the high-quality reference books when they rushed to the bookstore. Equipment. So far, developers are also the Wrox books in that period. But the golden hot fever has passed, IT industry is rising in winter. If you keep the previous business ideas, or if you pursue cheap and in size, it's hard to avoid it. Internal people revealed that although Wrox claims that the average sales of each book is 49,000, the most popular selling is only 8,000 books in the actual late period, and many sales are even more poor space between 400 to 1000. The factors in the previous discussion and manuscript should be the direct cause of sales decline. From a deeper level consideration, the development of network communication technology has also brought a giant change in the development of technology publishing in recent years. On the one hand, if you encounter specific languages, specific problems of specific tools, developers often get answers from online in the first time; on the one hand, electronic media such as e-books, webpages, relative to paper books in terms of search, code copying, etc. There is a huge advantage, which brings unprecedented challenges to the publishers of Wrox's franchise development language / tool reference books. The reason for theoretical reading, classic textbooks continue to exist as paper books: people are willing to be in hand, carefully taste. For development tutorials that are filled with code examples and operations, the language reference is obviously on the display instead of paper books. Therefore, a trend in the current technology publishing is to migrate people like "online" to the website as much as possible. The Informit website, which is the most important signal, such as Pearson, Macmillan, and Prentice Hall: Developers can have under 30 US dollars per month (the price of half of the 1632 page is half-top) all overview The latest books in the publisher. In the swirls composed of IT Cast Cast and Electronic Publishing Trend, Wrox is naturally dangerous, it is difficult to say.
