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"

Comments

Meh

[larry bagina]

Pirate Bay discounts every eBook by 100%.

Re:Meh

[stretch0611]

Pirate Bay discounts every eBook by 100%.

And if we all bought from Pirate Bay, eventually there would no longer be any more quality ebooks.

O'Reilly is a decent publisher. Many of there books are well organized and are worth the money. And unlike the f-ing RIAA/MPAA, their products are DRM-Free. They let you copy it to any device you want; they will even put it directly into your dropbox folder if you would like them to.

Many people who pirate content claim that "if they had the money..." or "if they let me use it on ZZZ device..." Well now is your chance. Everything is on sale, and they do let you use it on any device that can read it Put up or shut up.

For the record, I own about 25 O'Reilly ebooks. I even own a bunch more older titles but I stopped buying printed tech books because I find dropbox and pdfs on my tablet much easier than a broken bookcase and lugging printed material around. (Though I will add the files to my dropbox account manually instead of storing my credentials on their server.)

Re:Virtual books are retarded.

[isopropanol]

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?

news? ad?

[C0R1D4N]

Why is this here?

Re:Virtual books are retarded.

[Gaygirlie]

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.

Re:Virtual books are retarded.

[vlm]

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.

Re:Virtual books are retarded.

[Hawke]

You posted this in reply to an O'Reilly promotion. You know, the one company who's ebook format is "unencrypted PDF". That one. The one company that CAN NOT take your book away. Where the book won't change unless you want it to. Where you can keep it on your own HD for as long as you can and no one will even know.

That company.

Re:Virtual books are retarded.

[TheRaven64]

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.