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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

#121

Post by codewithcheese »

nightski wrote: post #114
ehnto wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is worth noting JetBrains still offer buy it once and own it licenses, and even their subscription grants you an eternal license to the particular version you were on when you stopped subscribing.

I'm pretty sure it's to the version that is 12 months behind when you stopped subscribing. You have to subscribe for an entire year to own the version when you started. So if you subscribe for 12 months, and then cancel, you actually have to revert back to a version 1 year old. It's pretty messed up. Plus the updates have REALLY been lacking. They have missed the quarterly releases regularly and it just feels like ve…

Your essentially paying for the product at the time of your payment and a 12 month subscription to updates. From that point of view it makes some sense that once your subscription is finished you revert back to the original product you bought you when subscribed. It does seem unnecessarily punitive though.

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

#122

Post by chippy »

It's clear O'Reilly is struggling. I personally know some authors, and they have made some great books, but I've not bought much from them for around 10 years. They seem to have dropped from my radar. I no longer hear from my friends that they are publishing their books with O'Reilly.

Also, O'Reilly produced and ran a number of excellent quality conferences (ETech anyone?) These disappeared a long time ago. I also remember them sponsoring a whole range of meetups and smaller conferences with books given out for free being quite common. O'Reilly has changed, and they need to change too.

Perhaps the internet and search engines have overtaken technical books in general? Perhaps in seeing their market share decrease over the years they need to make drastic changes to adapt?

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

#123

Post by bearsnowstorm »

I'm sure I'm not their biggest customer, but I have bought in the hundreds of dollars worth of books each year from O'Reilly for the last few, consumed as DRM free PDFs. Definitely going to re-evaluate that. When I want to buy a book on a topic I used to Google "O'Reilly " as my first port of call. That just ended. I'll look to other publishers first instead, and cease recommending O'Reilly.

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

#124

Post by swiley »

cstejerean wrote: post #70
clumsysmurf wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google is very good at linking those and it sounds like people have had their non-developer accounts suspended before.

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

#125

Post by HappyTypist »

swiley wrote: post #124
cstejerean wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google is very good at linking those and it sounds like people have had their non-developer accounts suspended before.

Correct, I've had a Google account suspension result in 4 linked accounts being suspended. The others were restored after an appeal though.

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

#126

Post by dcminter »

bearsnowstorm wrote: post #123

I'm sure I'm not their biggest customer, but I have bought in the hundreds of dollars worth of books each year from O'Reilly for the last few, consumed as DRM free PDFs. Definitely going to re-evaluate that. When I want to buy a book on a topic I used to Google "O'Reilly " as my first port of call. That just ended. I'll look to other publishers first instead, and cease recommending O'Reilly.

Why would their Safari service not be suitable for you if you prefer to consume their content as PDFs anyway?

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

#127

Post by swiley »

kronos29296 wrote: post #115
kin wrote: post #27

The $399/yr doesn't make sense for a lot of people. It definitely is too high a price point for me as I only read 1 or 2 O'Reilly books a year at most. It's nice to have a copy lying around for reference years later. On the flip side, I totally understand them going DRM-only for digital publishers. O'Reilly PDFs are way too easy to find for free with minimal Google-fu.

Only thing that will change with DRM is less Google-fu and more Pirate-fu which people with good google-fu also have in abundance.

Yeah there's absolutely no way I would ever pay for something with DRM.

This will end up going the way the textbooks went.

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

#128

Post by syshum »

tallanvor wrote: post #120
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix and Spotify operate completely different business models, and their customer base has completely different needs and requirements. They're also much cheaper. Safari has always been an also-ran side platform. The "growth of subscribers" on Safari may exceed direct sales, but what's driving that growth? Is it really because Safari is Just That Awesome? Does the management team have any idea? This is a classic e…

I mean, "much cheaper" doesn't mean much. I pay $199/year for Safari. It's more expensive than Netflix or Spotify, sure, but still only $17/month. And regarding Safari being an "also-ran side platform", I'm wondering if maybe you were thinking of the old SafariBooksOnline platform. They switched to Safari a couple of years ago which is definitely more modern and cheaper, although it does do away with the tokens you w…

The current price is $400 per year not $199, if you get a discount or have a grandfathered rate that should not be used as a talking point to defend their pricing as a person signing up today will not get that rate. So you have to base the argument on today's prices...

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

#129

Post by dcminter »

dcminter wrote: post #126
bearsnowstorm wrote: post #123

I'm sure I'm not their biggest customer, but I have bought in the hundreds of dollars worth of books each year from O'Reilly for the last few, consumed as DRM free PDFs. Definitely going to re-evaluate that. When I want to buy a book on a topic I used to Google "O'Reilly " as my first port of call. That just ended. I'll look to other publishers first instead, and cease recommending O'Reilly.

Why would their Safari service not be suitable for you if you prefer to consume their content as PDFs anyway?

Oh, looking at their site, I now see that it's a substantially different cost and set of constraints than those that applied when I allowed my subscription to lapse. Disregard.

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

#130

Post by martinkl »

sjcole wrote: post #95

Folks, www.eBooks.com is still selling O'Reilly titles without DRM. Prices might be less competitive than Amazon, but we're not Amazon. http://www.ebooks.com/subjects/computers/

I just looked up my own O'Reilly book on ebooks.com. http://www.ebooks.com/95729334/designing-data-intensive-appl... I can't see anything about DRM on the page, but under "supported devices" it says "e-readers with Adobe Digital Editions installed". Isn't that DRM enforcement software? Could you clarify please?

Edit: this page explicitly says that readers need to be compatible with Adobe DRM https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/214119286-Guide...

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