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O’Reilly Media has stopped retailing books directly on its ecommerce store

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Re: O’Reilly Media has stopped retailing books directly on its ecommerce store

#3
This really sucks.

It was my favorite place to buy books. It seemed like the one place that had the model closest to being right.

- They used to have an ongoing discount of 45% and more on special holidays.

- They were DRM free in multiple formats and they gave you discounts on ebooks if you had purchased the print books.

- They had regular updates to ebooks posted in one single list that you could keep up with.

I wish I had purchased all the books on my wish-list before this was announced.

The Safari subscription model makes no sense to my use-case.

I guess that makes Informit.com and No Starch Press my goto book stores. Also Manning and Apress, but their selection is weaker.

Re: O’Reilly Media has stopped retailing books directly on its ecommerce store

#4
I just posted this on another thread:

I just got this via email and I'm very disappointed too. DRM issues aside, Kindle is still terrible for tech books. Code samples, data tables, etc. They all look crummy. The pdf ebooks from the Oreilly store had far superior formatting.

Re: O’Reilly Media has stopped retailing books directly on its ecommerce store

#6
post #2

Having purchased many books thru O'Reilly, and now using Safari Online - I'm a huge fan of this move. Feels to me like going from iTunes to Spotify, or Netflix DVDs to Streaming.

I'm not. I purchased many books from O'Reilly as well, but the number is more like 4-5 books a year. Even with just 4-5 books a year I still usually end up with a book left unread or unfinished every time.

Spotify/Netflix makes perfect sense for a subscription model because of the way we consume musics/videos. The same can't be said for technical books. Not for $399 a year anyway. With that price point, seems like they are hoping to get employers to pay for it.

Re: O’Reilly Media has stopped retailing books directly on its ecommerce store

#7
This is devastating ... I don't have the income to justify $399/yr for Safari subscription.

"the growth of membership on Safari far exceeds the individual units previously purchased on oreilly.com"

... that doesn't explain why the two options couldn't co-exist.

"In addition to giving our customers the choice and convenience they expect"

... no, they just took away the choice and convenience I expect.

Over time, I've favored different formats based on what devices I have owned, and bugs in the apps themselves (OS X 10.11 Preview had terrible PDF rendering for non-retina devices). So there goes my choice on what I want to buy when, and what format to use where.

I hope this doesn't encourage InformIT, Manning, PragProg or RockyNook to go down these roads. Until then, I guess they will get my money.

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