Gary Cornell decided to ditch academia and become a technical book publisher in 1998, just in time to face a huge downturn in tech book publishing as the dot com bubble burst. Today, Cornell's Apress is proof of life after the bubble in a competitive market, producing bestsellers from authors such as Joel Spolsky and Dan Appleman. Scott Mace spoke with Gary, the CEO/publisher/co-founder of Apress, about topics ranging from outsourcing to Wikipedia. He also discusses how to keep programming jobs in the U.S., building the Apress super-index, E-books and DRM, why most tech book publishers rejected Amazon's Look-inside-the-book, and lay-flat books. He takes issue with Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters, weighs in on C# vs. Java, Eclipse, and AJAX. He says SOA is CORBA done right, and ponders real vs. virtual conerences.

---

IT Conversations' publication of this program is underwritten by your donations and:

---

Gary Cornell has been writing and teaching programming professionals for more than 20 years and is the co-founder of Apress, the fastest growing publisher for IT professionals in the world. He has written numerous best selling books for programming professionals and was a co-finalist for a Jolt Award and won the Readers Choice award from Visual Basic Magazine. He has a Ph.D from Brown University. He has also been a Professor of Mathematics, a visiting scientist at IBM's Watson Labs, a program director at the United States's National Science Foundation, and the director of Modern Visual Computing at the University of Connecticut's Center for Professional Development.

Resources:

• Apress
• The Apress weblogs

This program is from the Opening Move series.

For Team ITC:

• Description editor: Scott Mace
• Post-production audio engineer: Paul Figgiani