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O'Reilly Discounts Every eBook By 50%
destinyland writes "O'Reilly and Associates just announced that they're offering a 50% discount on every ebook they publish for Cyber Monday. Use the code CYBERDAY when checking out to claim the discount (which expires at midnight). Amazon has also discounted their Kindle Fire tablets to just $129. Due to a production snafu, they've already sold out of the new Kindle Paperwhite, and won't be able to ship any more until December 21"
Orly?
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Pirate Bay discounts every eBook by 100%.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
If however you need some information now about a topic that becomes obsolete rapidly, why not save money, resources, and shelf space by getting it electronically?
Why is this here?
You may have missed the fact that these files are DRM-free and can be stored on any device you like -- including your local computer with your local music.
At long last, Slashdot and Woot! have merged into this fantastic, multi-pronged marketing bonanza whose efficiencies are finally being fully leveraged.
Amazon's also discounted thousands of ebooks by 80% today. (James Gleick's "Chaos" is just $2.02, and you can buy an ebook version of Einstein's Theory of Relativity for 99 cents!)
http://www.beyond-black-friday.com/2012/11/26/80-discounts-on-kindle-ebooks-for-cyber-monday/
If so, then I apologize for thinking we as customers are always being cheated. If on the other hand, selling them at 50% off still returns some profit, something must change. It's that capitalism?
Umm, what? There are so many things wrong with your comment it's hard to know where to start. First of all, being ebooks the cost to O'Reilly per copy is near zero, so obviously they aren't selling at a "loss" at any time. Their normal prices are likely set by 2 factors: a high enough price that they can pay the author and still make a tidy profit, and a low enough price that people will still buy. By lowering prices, they increase the number of copies but lower net profit per unit, which means they might end up making little to no profit over their regular prices (or even less, or more likely a lot more).
However, in no case and no matter what price they set, they are never cheating the customer. The customer pays what he thinks the book is worth. If the price is too high, he has the option of simply not buying. Not like there aren't a million other things he could spend his money on for entertainment or knowledge. That's how capitalism works.
If you're wondering why they don't set the price low permanently, the answer is simple. Some people will pay full price to get the book when or nearly when it comes out. Some will not, and will wait for sales or lowered prices, or simply not buy it if the price doesn't get lowered. Steam is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon. They sell tons of games at full price to people who want it now, and discount them 50-75% later on. The customers know this, and some will wait, while some will not. Either way, all parties involved end up getting what they want.
Prices for electronic "goods" are a lot more complex than "always as low as will still make you some profit on the individual unit".
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
But for reference books, I prefer hard copies that I can browse thru at my leisure, leave open on a desk or quickly flip between sections.
open / flipping / browsing don't really do it for me. However I do "grep" them a lot. Search is the killer feature.
The problem for authors and publishers is making their reference ebook better than what you'll find via google.
I've owned and read a lot of oreilly books and they fit 4 classes:
1) anything with "cookbook" in the title = worth the money, best as a searchable ebook
2) anything with "intro" or "learning" in the title = worth the money, best either old fashioned paper or ebook only if you dual monitor or have a dedicated reader device
3) anything purely reference-ish = better off just googling for the answer for free
4) Mix of the above. Think "programming perl". Worth the money. Best off as paper copy for learning, because pure reference stuff will never be looked up, google gets searched first.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It's been said before, but it may need to be a rebuttal to every instance of this silliness on this thread: These eBooks are not DRMed, or auth'ed, etc. What you get is the ability to download the eBook in one of several versions, including PDF, with which you can do whatever the hell you want, without checking in with their server ever again.
The nutshell books are still valuable. I refer to Python in a Nutshell frequently. Yes I could google it, but sometimes skimming a page is actually faster, and the book is layed out in a very logical fashion and it's easy to flip to the right section.
Not everyone likes to carry that 1000+ page brick with them on a bus/train/airplane. Pros and cons like everything in life...
That company.
DRM laden? I dl the PDF and put it on my local server. I can then privately access it via my Nook, Android, or any of my home machines.
Neil Cherry - Linux Smart Homes For Dummies
Oh, they could take it away, but that would involve either hacking into your computer or breaking into your house. Both of which are illegal. (Which makes me wonder why remote-deletion isn't?)
"X offers 50% off!" would be nothing but a slashvertisment if it wasn't O'Reilly, one of the few publishers who really understand the geek market.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
While O'Reilly does make their work available DRM-free, I take exception to the 'the one company' part of your post. Pearson[1] makes all of their books available in DRM-free PDF and ePub versions from here. O'Reilly may be the underdog in this market, but they're not the only one doing the right thing. They've been providing DRM-free books since at least 2007 (I only started paying attention when they published my first book).
[1] Owner of the Addison Wesley and Prentice Hall brands, among others.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Whenever possible we provide them to you in several DRM-free file formats — PDF, ePub, Kindle-compatible .mobi, and DAISY — that you can use on the devices of your choice.
Furthermore:
Lending: If you buy an O'Reilly ebook from oreilly.com, you may lend it to another person, provided that you do not retain any copies of the book after you lend it. This is the same as the situation when you lend a used print copy—when you lend the copy, you deliver it to the buyer and no longer have a copy in your library. If you have bought a hard copy/ebook bundle, you may of course retain the hard copy, if you lend the ebook.
Resale: If you buy an O'Reilly ebook, when you are done with it you may resell it, provided that you do not retain any copies of the book after you sell it. This is the same as the situation when you sell a used print copy—when you sell the copy, you deliver it to the buyer and no longer have a copy in your library. If you have bought a hard copy/ebook bundle, you may of course retain the hard copy, if you sell the ebook.
I really wanted to change my sig to something witty, but all I could come up with is this.
I like my Nook. It is easier to haul around than the stack of reference books I need (PHP, Javascript, HTML5, CSS, Perl). And it takes up much less desk space.
OTOH, there was a time when I could flip to the exact page in this or that book to cross check some squirmy detail of syntax or best practice. I haven't figured out how to do that on the eReader as yet. But that is a matter of developing new habits to replace outmoded ones. Not a problem with the technology.
Will
I was in the mood to buy a DRM-free ebook or two at the discount price, but after five minutes at O'Reilly I gave up the hunt. There's no category in the subject index for big data / machine learning. And neither did I quickly identify a filter on level of presentation. No, I don't need a quick review of the data structures in R.
I found a free download entitled "Big Data Now: 2012 Edition". There are some tidbits of interest in here, but over all it's a little too button-down for my tastes. It mentioned Apache Mahoot for machine learning. Hey, I'd buy an intermediate to advanced book on that at half price--if such a book existed.
One of the problems with buying on price opportunity is that you frame the problem of "given this pile, what's best for me" instead of "given what's best for me, is there anything of note in this pile at all". I'm reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow and presently basking in the availability glow of just how stupid humans are, most of the time. We're idiots for framing and anchoring effects.
I mean, I nearly rolled off the bed in hysterics last night when I read that most people find it easy enough to list six occasions where they have behaved assertively (and this activity causes them to report having an assertive personality) but asking people to list twelve occasions where they've been assertive is hard work and causes people to doubt that they are really so assertive after all. Twelve considered difficult? I don't need no book on big data, I can type it in by hand in JSON notation wherever the need arises. I'm assertive pretty much whenever I sit at a keyboard or open my mouth or pull up to a four-way traffic control. You know, in a group setting you don't need to control the outcome. One can accomplish a lot by quietly (yet assertively) trimming away the worst stupidities. Well-timed application of the pruning shears to group psychology seems assertive enough to me.
I have a recommendation shelf at Goodreads for the narrow category "Computer Science". This presently includes many O'Reilly book: Regular Expressions, Haskell, JavaScript, TCP/IP. Someday, if Goodreads exploits big data in some useful way, this might actually feature the books from O'Reilly where there was any chance in hell of me making a purchase.
First suggestion: refine the "not interested" button to include "been there, done that". Regular expressions are way cool for the first decade of one's programming career.
O'Reilly offers huge sale, takes down their site