The story (some is speculation) goes that in October 1996, the publication of the Blue Camel (1st edition) was Any Day Now. O'Reilly was supposed to have the first shipment of them at the LISA X conference in Chicago, and had a book signing scheduled for that night. Only one problem -- no books. Friends of mine and I scoured the city to find a Blue Camel and found that other people were doing the same and there were none to be had at any price. You could pre-order them from ORA (which I did), but not actually get one. So ORA has hundreds of anxious sysadmins and no books. Instead they crack open a crate of t-shirts and let the autographing begin.

O'Reilly ships (I think it was) 10 (yes ten) copies of the Camel-2, to the premiere of the Camel-2, when there was an expected book signing, and knowing it was a convention of sysadmins (LISA), traditionally the strongest market for the Camel.

Luckily, the Chicago bookstores had just received their allotments, so we actually bought books at retail to get them to the conference for the signing. Amazingly bad planning.

The excuse I'd heard is "Well, we typically don't sell very many books, and it's expensive to ship the unsold books twice". {sigh}

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker