Like a lot of people, I feel like O'Reilley has
lost it's Cool status. It's still a good technical
book publisher, but just one of a number of them.

Since you're asking, here's some things
that probably gave me this feeling:

(1) O'Reilley books used to be titled things like
"lex & yacc" where you might pick up the book
just to figure what it's about. Now there seems
to be an attempt to downplay the technical terms
e.g. there's no "mod_perl" book.

(2) Publishing Windows oriented books certainly wasn't a good sign... sorry, it doesn't matter to me
that you're making money on them. Pursue maximal short-term revenue strategies if you want, but don't go
whining "how come no one loves us any more?!".
If you're going to act like just
another publisher, then we'll regard you as just
another publisher.

(3) There seems to be a tendency to milk subjects
with too many books. You can't pick up an O'Reilley
and expect it to be really definitive any more (even if it claims to be in the sub-heading):
e.g. I snapped up the first Palm book during one
lunch break, figuring that it might have some
info on programming it... but it turned out to
be an idiot's book, little more than a listing
of URLs (as though I couldn't find them with a
search engine). The book on *Programming* Palm's
that came out later. Similarly, I picked up
"Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics", with some
reservations because the Perl aspects were obviously too elementary for me, and *then*
the "Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills" book came out, which is what I should have
waited for.

(4) O'Reilley has been slow to come out with books on some cool technical subjects, e.g.
"Postgresql". By the time O'Reilley got to it,
I had Postgresql books from a few other different
sources, so you didn't sell any of those to me.

Oh, and once last sign of the apocalypse for you:
what's with the white spines all of a sudden?
You've had the other technical book publishers
desperately trying to figure out how to come up
with a cool look something like O'Reilley's, so you
decide to drop the colored spines for those boring white ones?

(By the way: on the plus side, those Pocket
Reference books are a great idea. I'd never
have bought a full size book on a subject like
CVS or the Gimp, but a slim paperback like the
Pocket References fits the subject perfectly.)