Ten Years at My Other Publishing Company

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Tim O'Reilly
Feb. 28, 2004 11:06 AM
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To my audience here at oreilly.com, I'm best known as a technology publisher and activist. But as some of you know, I'm also the co-founder of an award-winning travel book publishing company, Travelers Tales. The books we publish are a departure from the normal style of travel guides. Instead, we try to give you a sense of a destination by sharing the true stories of people who've been there. As one early reader remarked, "I feel like I've already been there, and now I'm ready for my second trip."

I launched TT in 1993 with my brother James and his writing parner Larry Habegger. My brother Sean later joined the company, so it's a real family affair.

Our very first book, Travelers Tales Thailand, published in December 1993, won the Lowell Thomas Award as best travel book of the year, an award we've received many times since. In addition to destination-specific anthologies, we've also published bestselling collections of women's travel stories and advice, and travel humor. Now to celebrate our 10 year anniversary, we’ve launched a new annual series, The Best Travelers’ Tales, to be published every February in conjunction with Chinese New Year. The first book in the series, The Best Travelers’ Tales 2004, is just out for The Year of the Monkey, and to give it a proper launch we’ll be celebrating at Book Passage in Corte Madera, California Friday, Mar. 5 at 7 p.m.

Larry Habegger and I will be on hand to talk about the ideas behind Travelers Tales, and what makes the series so successful. Many of the contributors to the books (including Simon Winchester, who wrote the intro to the new book) will be reading their stories. I'll be reading from my story "Walking the Kerry Way." The event will be jointly hosted by Book Passage, the Writer’s Center of Marin, and Travelers’ Tales. If you want to know more about this other side of my life, come by for a visit.

Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. In addition to Foo Camps ("Friends of O'Reilly" Camps, which gave rise to the "un-conference" movement), O'Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the Web 2.0 Summit, the Web 2.0 Expo, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the Gov 2.0 Summit, and the Gov 2.0 Expo. Tim's blog, the O'Reilly Radar, "watches the alpha geeks" to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim's long-term vision for his company is to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. In addition to O'Reilly Media, Tim is a founder of Safari Books Online, a pioneering subscription service for accessing books online, and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, an early-stage venture firm.

Comments on this weblog

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Didn't know
2004-03-01 11:28:38 betis70 [View]

Before going to language school in Spain, I bought your Traveler's Tales Spain. What a great book! I still read stories from it. I should have know the book came from the same great publisher as my favorite tech books.

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