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I'm writing to let you know about some changes—including new opportunities for you—at O'Reilly.
First, as of today, we are discontinuing fulfillment of individual book and video purchases on shop.oreilly.com. Books (both ebook and print) will still be available for sale via other digital and bricks-and-mortar retail channels. Plus, every book and video will still have a product page on oreilly.com, offering customers two options for getting the content they want: Safari membership (starting with a free 10-day trial) and, for books, a "buy from Amazon" button.
Why the change? It's clear that we're in the midst of a fundamental shift in how people get and use content. Subscription services like Spotify and Netflix are the new norm, as people opt for paying for digital access rather than purchasing physical units one by one. We've already seen this in our own business—the growth of subscribers on Safari far exceeds the individual units previously purchased on oreilly.com. That's the reason for the change.
And with Safari, O'Reilly is uniquely positioned to give our customers the choice and convenience they expect. When we launched Safari back in 2001, we knew we were investing in the future of publishing, and today, that future is here. Since 2014, when O'Reilly became sole owner of Safari, we have refocused our business around its potential as a membership platform. It's working—just this week, Outsell Insights published a report on Safari that gave us a "Strongly Positive" rating and noted that, "Safari shows that continuous reinvention through the addition of new tools onto a solid content base provides an extremely strong foundation on which to build a business. As an example, it also shows the kind of timescales necessary to build a strong reputation for quality content, one on which a more tools-focused solution is possible."
That's where "new opportunities for you" come in. We've developed successful new products like Live Online Training and video Learning Paths, available exclusively on Safari, and we have more in the works. We'll be in touch soon with more information about these new ways we can work together on Safari. And of course, we will continue to publish books and videos that are available both as stand-alone products and on Safari.