People Who Need People

O'Reilly's letter also led Bezos to accompany him toWashington, D.C., in an effort to educate legislators aboutsoftware patents. That meeting may have discouraged othercompanies from maliciously enforcing software patents.

Noren believes that such grassroots initiatives makedevelopers more loyal to O'Reilly's brand and therefore moreinclined, for example, to pick up O'Reilly's book on Javainstead of a competitor's.

"[In July] we had almost 1.8 million unique visitors. Anunbelievable number of people come two to three times aweek," says Noren, crediting the site's activism for thetraffic. "If you can get people coming two to three times aweek, and consistently, you can bet that a lot of people arebuying our books."

Not only do IT professionals buy O'Reilly's books, butthey also offer ideas for new ones. Two years ago, a fewvisitors to OReilly.com began asking for a book on Exim, anopen-source-based agent similar to Sendmail that isresponsible for routing and delivering e-mail. O'Reillypolled site visitors, asking them if they would beinterested in a book on Exim. They said yes. Now the problemwas, who was going to write it? Then Philip Hazel, the manwho began building Exim in 1995, stepped forward,virtually-speaking, and Exim: The Mail TransferAgent hit the shelves in July.

OReilly.com's success is a result of the company finding adifferent way to approach community, one that differentiatesthe publisher from the countless websites offering chats andbulletin boards to serve software engineers.