I'm reading some comments here that are disappointed, but I'm impressed.
O'Reilly navigated itself through two major contractions in tech book publishing. Practically every other company would have packed it in or found some really horrendous way to screw customers.
The first contraction was the dot.com crash. During the boom, O'Reilly was so flush with cash that they did things like put Larry Wall (creator of Perl) on payroll, just because. And right before the crash they built two new office buildings and a warehouse. So they were screwed when business went away and somehow they wiggled their way out of that.
I joined the company right after the crash and stayed for 2.5 years. Every employee meeting included an update on our negotiations with the banks--literally the CFO was begging banks to be able to stay in business. She's now CEO of the company.
I get a constant reminder of how lean things were then when I check my 401k account from that time. There was one all hands meeting where O'Reilly announced they were going to match contributions. The execs were so happy--I think they thought it was a signal that the tide had turned after waves of layoffs. (Even though I'm pretty sure the money came from a one-time windfall from being investors in Blogger)
The thing though about that matching contribution is that it wasn't much. It definitely wasn't one to one. I can't remember the exact rules for how much they were going to match. But my current 401k statement breaks out my contributions vs. O'Reilly's. After twelve years of compounding interest, that employer contribution is now worth $128.24. (In other words, things were so bad that they were celebrating contributing about $40 to my retirement).
And then, there was the second contraction. Up until about 2005, every single programmer had a library of O'Reilly books on their desk. That time is gone. I haven't seen a programmer who worked that way at any company recently (I'm sure there are some).
Most companies would have just packed it in. Tim O'Reilly had a good run and cares about other things, like politics. Dale Dougherty could do anything and has by starting Make Magazine and Makerfaire.
But there are hundreds of people at O'Reilly and they kept plugging away and finding ways to be relevant. Those ways just aren't books anymore--at least not like they used to be.
The company found other ways than books to make a difference. The O'Reilly conferences are cutting edge because O'Reilly still picks cutting edge people as conference chairs. And OATV, in venture capital, is another great example, which continues to experiment with things like Indie.vc.
So, to take it full circle. I'm impressed that O'Reilly is still in business at all, and more so that they are relevant at all. And when I look at their print business, I think, well, they're doing the best they can with a format that has declining importance.
I think about the context above when I hear about things like removing some book features or letting print quality slip. Those seem like reasonable adjustments that are much better than the alternatives which I think were probably go out of business or sell to Pearson.