Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

oreilly.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 260 posts

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

#51

Post by peterarmstrong »

This is very disappointing. When discussing the space, I liked to point at O'Reilly, Manning and the Prags as examples of tech publishers that did a good job directly selling ebooks. I've bought many books from all three of them.

(Disclosure: Manning author twice, Leanpub co-founder.)

Now, at Leanpub we're going to be rolling out our own courses in the next couple months, so we agree with O'Reilly that there are lots of great ways to produce and distribute learning material. However, the book is the best, most general and timeless way. We're committed to selling DRM-free ebooks in PDF, EPUB and MOBI directly from on our own site for the long term.

The ebook world should not just give up and sell everything through Amazon. I like Amazon--they do a great job of focusing on customers, I have Amazon Prime, and I'm really happy that Jeff Bezos is a good owner for the Washington Post. But we should not let Amazon become the only seller of ebooks.

Stay tuned for something else we're planning in this regard in a few weeks...

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

#52

Post by SomeHacker44 »

Sent this to Support at O'Reilly after reading their (to me, insane) e-mail.

Hi O'Reilly,

Just so you know - you've completely lost a customer. After years - decades really - of a highly dedicated customer (whose friends have written books you have published) you threw it all down the drain in one e-mail.

I will never purchase another book published by O'Reilly, or any company associated with O'Reilly, or associated with O'Reilly himself or any of the executives at O'Reilly. I sure as heck am not going to buy any technical books from O'Reilly by Amazon.

The things I liked from O'Reilly, now gone, are:

1. PDF, ePub and Mobi formats, all DRM free, so I could read them in the ideal format for each device I read them on. And, I have a lot of devices: several Macs and PCs, several iPads, several Kindles (used almost exclusively for fiction as technical works are horrible in non-PDF), several phones of various kinds. I could put both the ePub and PDF into iBooks (not my favorite app, but it does sync) and read the ePub on the subway if I wanted, and the PDF on the desktop and iPad (cause, as I said, ePub is terrible for technical books). I like my fully properly typeset color, indexed PDFs!

2. Buy it once, own it. Did you ever see me subscribe to Safari? No? Ever wonder why not? For the same reason that I don't use Adobe products anymore except Lightroom (which is still a purchase not a subscription), and why I dropped JetBrains when they moved to their subscription model and then re-joined them when they went to "Subscription + keep your start of subscription version forever". I don't rent stuff. I buy it and own it. Plain and simple.

I'm glad that there are other publishers out there like Pragmatic Press and Apress that have been publishing good content, because you just lost a highly dedicated customer who always shopped O'Reilly first even for non-O'Reilly books. Congratulations, and shame on you.

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

#53

Post by SomeHacker44 »

michaelmrose wrote: post #23

Amazon is a terrible place to buy books. Its difficult to discern which books are encumbered by drm and further even if the publisher provides the book drm free its damn difficult to get at the unencumbered ebook file. I bought such a book and spent an hour of my life and talked to 3 separate employees and the best I could do was a refund after talking to 3 apathetic employees. As far as I'm concerned there is not on…

I don't mind buying pure-text books from Amazon. That basically means novels. I don't even mind the DRM so much, as I read the book once and then don't really care, and because I have almost never had problems with the fact that I have literally over a dozen Kindle devices and Kindle-app running devices.

However, technical, computer, electronics, physics and math books are almost all uniformly terrible from Amazon (or even epub). These are long-term references that need a proper print layout option (PDF) and be unencumbered by DRM. A 2002 edition of Mastering Regular Expressions is virtually totally applicable today, 15 years later - but imagine if I had bought this in a DRM'd Sony version, or a Palm .prc (now part of Amazon)? I'd be SOL.

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

#54

Post by michaelmrose »

ianai wrote: post #46
michaelmrose wrote: post #11

In case it might help anyone many libraries pay for a subscription to safari books. For example the Seattle library system provides free access to safari books to all card holders. Seattle library cards are available not only to anyone in who works, lives or owns property in seattle/king county but also those who have a card in one of several surrounding county library systems. Further non-resident cards may be had f…

Can you essentially only read the books from the library website?

Years ago I wrote up a quick script using imacros and calibre to create epubs based on the documents available from safari.

I would consider this fair use format shifting. Legal opinions probably vary but this was essentially indistinguishable from just reading the book so long as the script didn't grab a page per second and pretty easy to do.

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

#56

Post by wavefunction »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #21

O'Reilly author here. This is the email we got today. Sounds like they also plan to offer courses through Safari as well. ------------------------- 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 v…

"including new opportunities for you"

I'll be the judge of that

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

#57

Post by SomeHacker44 »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #21

O'Reilly author here. This is the email we got today. Sounds like they also plan to offer courses through Safari as well. ------------------------- 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 v…

Subscription services like Netflix are cheap. Vastly cheaper than Safari. Furthermore, Netflix allows two viewing streams simultaneously, 24 hours a day, and all five members of my household have their own profiles. We almost certainly spend more hours as a family on Netflix than we do reading O'Reilly books (especially since it's mostly just me who does that, and sometimes my son when we're doing programming together).

I'm not spending $399/year. Maybe if it were $8/month like I spend on Netflix and Crunchyroll or Amazon Prime (paid annually), sure. (Granted, this household uses Prime for delivery and ignore their streaming stuff mostly.)

Goodbye O'Reilly. Not only will I not buy Safari, I will not buy any O'Reilly product ever again.

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

#58

Post by SomeHacker44 »

torstenvl wrote: post #12

Deeply disappointing. O'Reilly had some really good things going for it, and it just decided to flush it down the drain. This is on par with Apple moving to butterfly switch keyboards across its entire laptop line, or Netscape deciding to ditch its browser and rewrite it from scratch. Tragic, user-hostile blunders. And it wouldn't completely surprise me if this marked the beginning of the end for O'Reilly.

(It's the "touch bar" that made this my last Apple laptop until they get rid of it, but true, the keyboard is pretty darn bad too.)

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

#59

Post by EwanToo »

kqr2 wrote: post #48

I can understand their decision to stop selling print books, however, since they are still selling safari, why not continue to sell individual ebooks? Is the infrastructure and maintenance that much different?

This is surely the unspoken element of O'Reilly's change here, piracy of technical PDFs is rampant.

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

#60

Post by SomeHacker44 »

kin wrote: post #22
dcw303 wrote: post #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.

Google Play store offers O'Reilly books DRM free in both PDF and ePub format.

Does it have the same pricing as O'Reilly's online store did? Heavy discounts (60%+) for multiple book purchases over $100? Early access books? What about .mobi? (I still have some actual eInk Kindles including the original DX!)
Post reply on HN