O'Reilly is able to hold the position he does because he publishes high quality work. If you walk into a bookstore knowing nothing other than you need a book on Subject X, the book you walk out with will probably have a pen and ink animal drawn on the cover.
Most other creators are just churning out low rate disposable content. Their business models are struggling under the legal alternatives the internet has come to offer, just look at what happened to newspapers.
Now that distribution is solved, competition has sky-rocketed and they're fighting a market that wants to show them just how little their product is worth these days. Steam may be the internet distribution posterboy, but think of any other type of media producer who looks at steam. There are rock bottom prices on everything that isn't a AAA title released in the last 6 months.
They're stuck fighting the new marketplace realities, they can't afford to see piracy in the periphery (like O'Reilly can), so they do the one thing they know how to: give cash to congress to make that problem go away.
Don't forget that he's got that Safari, too, which is essentially "Books as a Service." Yes, his books are high quality too (I have a ton!), but he also has a superior distribution platform that the pirates simply cannot match.
This is exactly how I got the PHP reference that's sitting next to me when I walked into the bookstore years ago. I didn't even know who O'Reilly was then, but the book was clear and easy to understand.
Most other creators are just churning out low rate disposable content. Their business models are struggling under the legal alternatives the internet has come to offer, just look at what happened to newspapers.
Now that distribution is solved, competition has sky-rocketed and they're fighting a market that wants to show them just how little their product is worth these days. Steam may be the internet distribution posterboy, but think of any other type of media producer who looks at steam. There are rock bottom prices on everything that isn't a AAA title released in the last 6 months.
They're stuck fighting the new marketplace realities, they can't afford to see piracy in the periphery (like O'Reilly can), so they do the one thing they know how to: give cash to congress to make that problem go away.