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O'Reilly No Longer Selling Individual Books, Videos Online
dovf writes: Just got an email from O'Reilly Media that as of today, they are no longer selling individual books or videos online -- rather, they are encouraging people to sign up for Safari. They are continuing to publish books and videos, "and you'll still be able to buy them at Amazon and other retailers." They also make it clear that we will not lose access to already-purchased content, updates to such content, etc. More details can be found in the FAQ. No mention, though, of whether the content sold at these other retailers will remain DRM-free... From the FAQ: "You can buy all of the books (ebooks and print) at shop.oreilly.com from Amazon and other digital and bricks-and-mortar retailers. We're no longer selling individual books and videos via shop.oreilly.com -- but we are definitely continuing to publish books and videos on the topics you need to know. And of course, every O'Reilly book and video (including O'Reilly conference sessions) is available instantly on Safari." The only mention of "DRM" in the FAQ is in regard to what happens to the digital content you have in your account at members.oreilly.com. According to O'Reilly, "Your DRM-free ebooks and videos are safe and sound, and you'll continue to have free lifetime access to download them anytime, anywhere."
what a coincidence! I am no longer buying O'Reilly books, videos. win-win.
This sounds like they're just not going to be selling stuff directly anymore outside of Safari.
If I can still purchase individual titles via Amazon, especially for Kindle, then I can honestly say this is non-news to me
Does this mean you won't be able to get PDFs of their books anymore?
Amazon's mobi files are nowhere near as good as reading an O'Reilly book as a PDF.
Like many others probably do, I remember the O'Reilly of the 90s, when they made high quality acid-free print books with lay-flat binding.
I ordered a couple of books direct from their online store a few months ago, and it's obvious that making a high-quality print book isn't a priority for ORA anymore. Now they do print-on-demand on crappy paper stock, standard binding, and the type is inexcusably blurry; not sure if it's font aliasing or ink bleeding on the cheap paper. Needless to say their prices haven't gone down along with the quality though.
So yeah. Regardless of this decision, I won't be giving any more money to ORA. There are way better technical publishers nowadays who still care about making a good print product.
These days I only have three O'Reilly dead tree books on my shelf: "Learning The Bash" by Cameron Newham, "Mastering Algorithms with C" by Kyle Loudon, and "Revolution In The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How The Mac Was Made" by Andy Hertzfeld.
Two out of three books are still useful. When I go to Silicon Valley Comic Con next year, I'll have Steve Wozniak sign the Revolution book (he wrote the forward). I couldn't afford this year since he was raising money for a dog park charity by charging $100+ for his signature.
I'm sorry that they've stopped selling ebooks. It's really convenient to read reviews of an ebook, check out a few pages of it, pay for it, download it, and start reading it. I"ll do a free trial of Safari, and see if I like it.
Another option for buying ebooks is Peachpit Press. On the bottom right corner of each page, they put "From the Library of (your name)", which isn't too distracting. However, I haven't been able to find as many technical books that I want by Peachpit as by O'Reilly.
I can read PDFs on the systems I need to use without too much hassle. Now it appears that I won't be able to get them from O'Reilly or elsewhere for a one time charge. Signing up for Safari doesn't sound like a great deal to me. Anyone have experience with Calibre for reading ePub on desktop systems? Is it s reasonable alternative to PDF?
I opened Safari and don't see all these books that are supposed to instantly be available like these O'Reilly guys are talking about
Twinstiq, game news
Afford: yes.
Good value? No.
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
I'm not too keen on the kindle versions of O'Reilly books, and have bought certain books from their shop specifically because they offer PDFs, Technical books often rely on formatting conventions which are are more sophisticated than what a kindle can handle.
(I still prefer paper copies for some stuff, but they take up space, and some of them are less than portable.)
For example - if it works at all, it will connect to safaris defunct back-end upon start-up, and then block the UI thread until the connection times out(!). More times than not, I have to switch off wi-fi on my tablet in order to read downloaded content at all.
Whenever I need new books, I often end up searching for the book on safari, and then on Kindle. By the time I have found my book on the Kindle shop, read the reviews, purchased and downloaded the book - the safari search has still not displayed the first matches. This happens more often than not. If I /get/ lucky and find a book, there is a 70% chance that I the first 5 download attempts will fail. There is no re-try if I start several downloads - so I have to search for the books again all over.
If I really need to find something on Safari, from the Andrioid app, I usually start / kill the app around 20 times before I get any luck with the safari back-end.
Last time I looked, they had more 1 star reviews in the Google store than any other app I have ever installed. And the sad thing is that they (Safari) don't give a shit. The problems are only getting worse over time. I have used the service for 4 years - but I don't think I will renew it when the current subscription expires.
So Oreilly hates money? I have bought huge pile of their individual ebooks over the years.. Im sure some bean counter somehow has had mistaken idea that they can convert xx% of individual buyers to monthly subcriptions... I do hope this backfires on them badly.. Safari is very good for professionals that can tax deduct it easy. Not so god for hobbyist that has other hobbies competition that money as well.
How many of those books are non-crap? How much time do you have to go throught a hundred non-crap books in a year anyway?
Ezekiel 23:20
"O’Reilly has always been a privately held, self-funded company, and it’s a distinction we wear with pride. We don’t have any investors but our customers, who fund us by buying our products and services. That keeps us attuned to what the market is really telling us...The formats may change, but the mission stays the same." Read the whole post from O'Reilly's president at http://oreil.ly/2t9RnXP
Thanks for the pointer.