Earlier quoted context omitted.
You get free updates on eBooks, eh
Do you get free updates across editions? Seems unlikely to me.
You get 50% off future ebook editions.
O'Reilly is selling any eBook for $9.99 today
71–80 of 81 posts
Re: O'Reilly is selling any eBook for $9.99 today
#72This caught my eye... And then I remembered that my safaribooksonline subscription lets me read all the o'reilly books I want, and thousands of other tech books, for $20.00 a month. For anyone who wants to use this coupon, I'm not sure why you wouldn't just get yourself a month on safari... or a free trial for that matter.... Any ideas?
Their website says $42.99/month for new subscriptions!
Re: O'Reilly is selling any eBook for $9.99 today
#73Seems like this is a popular promotion, based on their website performance. I wonder if it will make anyone reconsider the recent controversy over Amazon's pricing for Kindle editions. Seems like lots of people are willing to buy e-books for $9.99.
Yeah at $9.99 it's worth picking up things for a look. At $30-$40 you want to be sure you'll have the time to read it and it's something useful/ interesting.
Exactly. Plus, $30-$40 for an ebook doesn't seem fair to me.
Before ebook prices started coming down, I had stopped buying tech books because they're very expensive and become obsolete in a few months.
Re: O'Reilly is selling any eBook for $9.99 today
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a Kindle DX. Love it for reading research PDFs from start to finish. I had also figured it would be fantastic to shrink the shelf space for tech books, and always have those books at hand. Big downside that doesn't hit you till you try to use it for this purpose: the e-ink can't page flip fast enough to be useful. Readers on the iPad (iBooks, even Kindle app) don't have this issue.
I'm not sure I follow. But what I have learned from reading HN is that I am probably the only person in the world that reads each page of a book in order. I start with the first page. When I'm done reading that page, I read the second page. Induct on n.
I read all books in order as well.
I prefer e-readers (Sony Reader, Kindle DX, iPad) because I read at the speed of about one airport novel per hour, meaning I need five books for a cross country flight. It's easier to carry these electronically, and I keep a backlog of 50 - 70 books available to read.
For computer books, such as the jQuery Cookbook I purchased yesterday from O'Reilly in this sale, I will also read each one from cover to cover. With that reading I form a visual spatial memory of where in the book I can find any information I need.
My memory is not eidetic. I can't read the actual words, and I don't remember every page number. But I do know about how deep in the book, left or right page, and where on the page to look, so I can usually find a needed reference within a half dozen page turns.
With e-readers, this is fuzzier. The "where in the book" depends on the progress bar, and there's no left or right to halve the search, so takes at least 10 - 20 page turns instead. These page turns are SLOOOOOW.
On the iPad, page turns are many times faster. So, finding reference material in a thick reference book that I cognitively mapped on the iPad is commensurately faster.
Re: O'Reilly is selling any eBook for $9.99 today
#75For anyone else trying to find this out and finding the site to be amazingly slow: Use coupon code FAVFA - prices won't be discounted until check-out. It works for multiple books, although the headline looks like it's for a single book.
> it works for multiple books
FYI: Looks like ordering multiple books created issues getting delivery of yesterday's purchases. I also lost the discount after checkout. Today's order pricing isn't what was reflected at checkout.
Today the two titles I bought in two orders are listed as "registered" under the registered books area.
Order status on both orders reflects "BOOKED", but shipped is 0, download link is not active, and the books are not listed in the downloads section.
One purchase shows the discount, the other reflects full price without discount.
An email to O'Reilly auto-responded with this:
> Thank you for contacting O'Reilly Media Customer Service. We are experiencing a very heavy volume of orders due to our recent promotion. This is affecting the delivery and access of your electronic media. Please be patient and keep checking your account.
TL;DR: Buyers should double-check orders to see what was actually charged.
Re: O'Reilly is selling any eBook for $9.99 today
#76If I had an iPad I might consider it to see if I can read on that, but I've found that I only ever read books when printed on the pulped, mangled, processed bodies of brutally murdered trees.
In general I agree, but pocket-reference e-books on your mobile shouldn't be scoffed at.
Exactly. If you're an on-the-move consultant who works with a bunch of different technologies, the last thing you want is more stuff to carry.
Re: O'Reilly is selling any eBook for $9.99 today
#77I think there are some valuable lessons to be learned by this sale for O'Reilly, tech publishers and authors.
* 9.99 standard pricing will result in incredibly high sales volumes (the servers would not nearly have been overloaded if everyone wasn't clamoring to get their purchases in before the deadline)
* Publishers and authors need to decide whether they want larger margins w/low volumes - I am of the understanding that selling 5k copies is considered a best seller in the tech market - instead of lower margins with higher volumes. I'm hoping that the results of yesterday's sale might make them consider the first point above.
It would be interesting to see if O'Reilly released some statistics on book sales in the wake of yesterday's server bloodbath.
Myself, I bought a pile of books that I otherwise would not have bought. I have an O'Reilly Safari subscription that is already saving me tons of money, and the low price just pushed me over the edge to buy some local copies of books that I might have otherwise just had in my bookshelf for a month.
Re: O'Reilly is selling any eBook for $9.99 today
#78Seems like this is a popular promotion, based on their website performance. I wonder if it will make anyone reconsider the recent controversy over Amazon's pricing for Kindle editions. Seems like lots of people are willing to buy e-books for $9.99.
These are technical books that retail for $30-$60; so $9 is a great price.
Amazon is charging $12-$13 for some novels that sell in hardback for $15, and $6.99 for some novels that are $7.99 in paperback. That's not such a great deal.
Re: O'Reilly is selling any eBook for $9.99 today
#79You can get $5 O'Reilly EPUBs from the App Store everyday. Extracting an epub from an iPhone app is easy. First you unzip the .ipa file. Then you cd to Payload/*/book. Finally, you zip up the files to an .epub file: zip -X ~/book.epub mimetype && zip -r9DX ~/book.epub META-INF OEBPS. mimetype must be first in the archive for validity, which you can test with EpubCheck.
This is definitely a hacky way to go. I just tried it with Matz’s Ruby book. Reading it with Stanza on OSX is just about the ugliest digital reading experience outside of scanned text. Oh well, it only set me back 5 bucks.
It's an issue of using a subpar client, not a subpar format. I have yet to find a decent epub reader for a computer. Stanza for iPhone, iBooks, and dedicated hardware render epubs beautifully.
Re: O'Reilly is selling any eBook for $9.99 today
#805/21/2010 — Due to heavy server volume you may experience
trouble downloading your ebook orders.
We expect to have the issue resolved soon. Please continue to check back or contact our Customer Service: accounts@oreilly.com