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O'Reilly No Longer Selling Individual Books, Videos Online

Posted by BeauHD on from the end-of-an-era dept.

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."

19 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. what a coincidence by veron.claudio · · Score: 5, Insightful

    what a coincidence! I am no longer buying O'Reilly books, videos. win-win.

    1. Re: what a coincidence by veron.claudio · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I have legally bought a generous amount of O'Reilly ebooks. I read mostly on my kindle and the mobi files where always quite good. also, no DRM at all. Also, being a regular customer gave you a 50% discount or someething, so the price was quite reasonable. And saved you a whole evening fishing for a 'free alternative' of exactly the book i wanted, in mobi/epub format. If it existed at all. The money/time/effort/content quality tradeoff was quite good, in my case. Now, O'Reilly is mostly an endless flow of the latest of the latest of the newest and up and coming fad and rehash tech of the week. Not much interesting to me anymore. I don't really need 'buying' a book (at most) of that every month, month after month. I think the authors of good books really deserve my money. O'Reilly now? not so sure.

    2. Re: what a coincidence by ma1wrbu5tr · · Score: 2

      As an aside. I find that I can still get used copies of recent O'Reily titles elsewhere online.. in print with free shipping. What? I'm pathologically cheap.

      --
      Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
    3. Re: what a coincidence by cayenne8 · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Hmm...I"ll miss this.

      I still have a LOT of O'Reilly books....back from learning Linux, setting up apache, email servers, etc.

      I must say, I did then and STILL prefer most of my book, especially tech stuff on dead tree format.

      I can mark the dead tree books up, highlight pages...and strangely enough, I can usually thumb to the pages I need to reference again MUCH faster in a real book than trying an ebook or website on a real computer......I mean, I can usually "see" the page in question in my head on a real book.

      This is much like how I did in school...I could see my notes in my head during tests...complete with notes and doogles in the margins.

      I just can't do that on digital format books....

      --
      Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
  2. I guess I'm confused.... by Drakonblayde · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:I guess I'm confused.... by tepples · · Score: 4, Funny

      This sounds like they're just not going to be selling stuff directly anymore outside of Safari.

      Where does that leave people who use something other than a Mac or an iPad to read O'Reilly material? Or does Safari not require Safari?

    2. Re:I guess I'm confused.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Same name, two different things.

      O'Reilly's Safari is a service that lets you read books online. It has a free trial period, then you have to pay for it.

      Apple's Safari is a web browser.

  3. Print quality has gone downhill by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Print quality has gone downhill by ZayJay · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I tell you what though, as a ten-year Safari user, its a better deal than you may think. They have tons of other publishers (Wiley, et al) available. Its pretty damn handy to be able to access virtually any relevant tech title on demand.

    2. Re: Print quality has gone downhill by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The quantity of information on Safari on phenomenal, but ever since they converted Safari to Safari Queue, they've made the interface godawful and just about unusable

    3. Re: Print quality has gone downhill by lucm · · Score: 2

      Amen to that. I had a subscription at work and at first it was pretty decent, but of course they had to make it useless. I think I'd rather read somehting printed in draft mode on recycled paper than use that thing.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    4. Re: Print quality has gone downhill by ZayJay · · Score: 2

      "Work For ME", I intended to say

  4. People still buy O'Reilly door stoppers... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:People still buy O'Reilly door stoppers... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 2

      FOREWORD, you fucking moon-faced mongoloid cretin. For such a prolific "author", you sure write like s a MONG!!!!

      I did that on purpose. I like to keep my audience ribbited.

    2. Re:People still buy O'Reilly door stoppers... by lucm · · Score: 2

      Why are you making fun of the "forward" thing? Isn't the fact that he can't afford a $100 expense funnier?

      --
      lucm, indeed.
  5. Peachpit ebooks by myid · · Score: 2

    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.

  6. I liked getting PDF format ebooks by cruff · · Score: 2

    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?

    1. Re:I liked getting PDF format ebooks by lucm · · Score: 2

      Anyone have experience with Calibre for reading ePub on desktop systems? Is it s reasonable alternative to PDF?

      I use it. It's not all that great, the resize is weird and overall it feels like using something from 1998. And there's a lot of bloat; there's even a built-in browser to "shop" on sites like Google Books, and half the links don't work. They could get rid of 90% of the "features" and it would be a big improvement. But when there's a lot of graphics it's the lesser evil.

      Whenever possible I use Kindle; the fact that the highlights are stored in my Amazon accounts is fantastic. I used to take notes or jump around to/from the browser whenever I would find an interesting reference in a book; now I just highlight it and later I can go to my highlights page and see them all at once. Also on Amazon many books can be rented instead of purchased, especially textbooks. When there's a lot of diagrams, though, it's not that good.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
  7. Safari's Android app from hell! by jarle.aase · · Score: 2
    Safari is a great service with lots of books. But their Android app is a disgrace!

    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.