O'Reilly talks about the lessons learned by its foray into e-book publishing.

Many people, both inside and outside of the publishing and media industry, are skeptical about the potential of paid content on mobile phones, especially given the troubled history of e-books. I beg to differ. In December 2008, O'Reilly's "iPhone: The Missing Manual" was published as an iPhone app. Since its release, the app has outsold the printed book, which is a best seller in its own right. We're learning a lot from the experience. Here our some of the questions that we're starting to answer.

Was the iPhone app for the "Missing Manual" an anomaly? After all, iPhone owners are the most likely audience for the "Manual."

O'Reilly: Conventional wisdom suggests that when choosing pilot projects, you pick ones with a high likelihood of success. This was a best-selling author on a red-hot topic. We're gearing up to release about 20 more books as iPhone apps, but realistically we don't expect any of those to sell as well as this first one.

Is the iPhone the most convenient place to get content about problems you're trying to solve on a computer?

For many of our readers, a first or second pass through one of our programming books is mainly about orienting to the landscape and getting a sense of the platform and what's possible, not about solving a particular problem at hand. The iPhone is a perfectly suitable environment for that kind of reading.

Won't you make less money selling iPhone apps than books? The computer book market is the computer book market, period. It has a certain size, and that's it. If you convert that market into iPhone app buyers instead of book buyers, say good-bye to your publishing business.

It would be economically bad news to sell a $5 product to someone who would otherwise pay $50. But it's good to sell a $5 product to someone who would not otherwise be a customer (provided, of course, that the marginal revenue exceeds marginal cost). For Safari Books Online, for direct sales of our e-books and now for this (single) iPhone app, the data suggests that they have created growth without sacrificing print market share. For example, our market share for printed computer books sold at retail was 14% in 2004, and is now 16%. According to Nielsen Bookscan data, the print version of iPhone: The Missing Manual has sold nearly as many copies as the next two competing titles combined in the time period since the app version went on sale in December.

This data only goes back to mid-January, but the 90-, 30- and seven-day averages on Amazon sales rank for the printed book have been steadily improving, suggesting that sales of the iPhone app version are not cannibalizing print sales--and may even be helping them.

Please spare us the "perfect storm" metaphor.

It's hackneyed, for starters. It doesn't square with the facts. And for people who fancy themselves leaders, it's downright unbecoming.

The reason the perfect storm is such an appealing metaphor for these shipwrecked captains of industry is that it appears to let them off the hook. After all, who can blame you if the ship goes down in one of those freak, once-in-a-century storms that result when three weather systems collide? It's an act of nature that nobody could have predicted -- or so the story goes.

The latest victim to offer the "perfect storm" defense is Sam Zell, the real estate tycoon who was smart enough to sell out at the top of the commercial real estate cycle, only to dive into the newspaper and broadcast business of the Tribune Co. just as circulation and advertising revenue were about to collapse.

Three weeks ago, it was the auto executives on their first visit to Washington who tried to convince us that the only reason they were running out of cash was a sharp drop in vehicle sales brought on by sky-high gas prices, a credit crunch and rising unemployment.

And in several recent interviews, Robert Rubin, the Treasury secretary turned boardroom consigliere, conjured up the perfect storm to explain how Citigroup and the rest of Wall Street nearly brought the global financial system to a grinding halt, vaporizing trillions of dollars in wealth and putting large swaths of the economy on government life support.

The first thing to understand about the perfect-storm defense is that these guys actually buy into this nonsense. The rest of us want desperately to believe that what brought us this economic crisis was some combination of greed, fraud and negligence -- and, no doubt, there was quite a bit of that. What the populist critique ignores, however, is that at the heart of any economic or financial mania is an epidemic of self-delusion that infects not only large numbers of unsophisticated investors but also many of the smartest, most experienced and sophisticated executives and bankers.

It's not that they don't see the excesses and dangers in front of them -- how could they not? But somehow they convince themselves that the world has changed, that the old rules no longer apply or that, because of competitive pressure, they had no choice but to run with the herd.

In recent months, I've had a chance to talk with half a dozen top business leaders whose companies have fallen into the soup and read published interviews with many more. And almost to a person, they say that they've been replaying the tape over and over in their minds and, even now, they still can't figure out what they might have done differently, given what they knew at the time and the various pressures they were under. Or put another way, they continue to think of themselves as victims of a perfect storm.

The second thing to understand is that, fundamentally, they're wrong.

It is useful to remember that in Sebastian Junger's gripping account of a shipwreck that popularized the notion of the perfect storm, Billy Tyne, the skipper of the Andrea Gail, received urgent and repeated warnings that he was heading into what could be a monster storm off the Grand Banks -- warnings that Tyne and his crew chose to ignore. After all, the weather immediately around them had been relatively calm, and the swordfish had been tantalizingly plentiful. And there were always worrywarts warning not to do this and not to do that. If Tyne had listened to them, the Andrea Gail would never have left port, let alone become one of the most successful sword boats in Gloucester, Mass.