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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

#61

Post by clumsysmurf »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #45
ilamont wrote: post #17

One other thing worth mentioning: Publishers (and authors) were notified of the change today . It's akin to an app store suddenly announcing a major shift in the business model and payouts to app developers, effective immediately. For my company, the single-title sales are often greater than Safari subscription income, and I am not sure sending visitors to Amazon is going to make up for the lost sales on O'Reilly. I…

I actually really like Safari books online, the all-you-can-eat subscription style matches my usage perfectly. My experience has been that most technical books aren't worth reading cover to cover, but many make for great references. When researching certain technical topics, I just open dozens of books and skip straight to the relevant sections.

But even if you like the subscription model, you are forced to consume the content a certain way. If I wanted to read on my Android tablet, presumably I'd use the Safari app ... which barely has a mediocre rating.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.safariflow...

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

#62

Post by pirocks »

SomeHacker44 wrote: post #52

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…

Random question: What did you switch to when you dropped JetBrains, and did you notice a productivity drop?

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

#63

Post by walterbell »

Lendal wrote: post #24

I'm a Safari online subscriber myself, but I think this decision is a huge mistake. I also own books that I purchased from O'Reilly and I still use those books. Just because I don't continue to re-purchase them doesn't mean I don't use them or will never purchase another. I use them on a daily basis. I also use Safari on a daily basis. Why can't they see that there is a need for both models? I rent things, and I own…

Online reading enables tracking, the data has value.

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

#64

Post by subpixel »

EwanToo wrote: post #59
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.

The thing is, by making pdfs harder to get through legit channels they are going to increase traffic through illegitimate channels. It's not about how many files are available, it's about how many people are looking for them.

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

#65

Post by JoshMnem »

kin wrote: post #20
detaro wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon selling PDFs? Brick and mortar selling PDFs?

Amazon sells Kindle versions so there's DRM. But, Google Play store offers PDF and ePub versions of O'Reilly books.

It seems more difficult to read programming books on a Kindle than as PDFs. I don't know if it's the lack of scrolling on Kindle or something else. I don't think that I would buy another programming book on Kindle.

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

#66

Post by throwaway2016a »

wavefunction wrote: post #56
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

Obviously in context it means O'Reilly authors but... I might consider contributing some course material. Based on the comments here, though, perhaps not. It's not much of an opportunity if it doesn't benefit the other party enough for them to pay.

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

#67

Post by clumsysmurf »

SomeHacker44 wrote: post #52

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…

As a Lightroom user myself, I'm a bit worried about that. Since the subscription model began, Lightroom seems to have languished a bit - and its been years since a standalone release.

Lets hope Affinity can put out a competitive DAM tool.

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

#68

Post by heartbreak »

SomeHacker44 wrote: post #58
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.)

Isn't that an optional feature?

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

#69

Post by KGIII »

manaskarekar wrote: post #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 wi…

Calibre will enable you to remove DRM. It is both handy and quick.

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

#70

Post by cstejerean »

clumsysmurf wrote: post #50
kin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon sells Kindle versions so there's DRM. But, Google Play store offers PDF and ePub versions of O'Reilly books.

There are significant problems with both options. For Amazon, when you buy an eBook, you are essentially given a license to use it. Amazon can revoke that - we've all heard of people moving to another country to see their entire library disappear, only (hopefully) remedied after enough hell was raised on some website. As for Play Books, lets imagine you are a Android developer working on the next great thing, and you…

If you are an Android developer it seems like it may be a good idea to use a dedicated Google account for Android development and keeping that separate from your personal email account that you use for Gmail, etc.
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