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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

#201

Post by jlangr »

chasing wrote: post #157
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…

> 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... I like subscriptions, to be honest. I don't need to "own" all this stuff (whatever "own" might mean) -- tech books and specific versions of software tend to have a relatively short shelf-life and I like both O'Reilly's, Adobe's, and JetBrain's models…

The subscription model makes sense for the vendors--I get that it costs money to put out new versions and support things.

For me, it depends on the "stuff" and its longevity. E.G. for JetBrains, I'd rather pay ~$600 once and for all, since I doubt I'll move off of it any time soon. Instead, to get updates, I'll now pay $299 per year in perpetuity (after yr 2). So if I use it 10 more years, I plunk out almost $3000.

Even all the little junk adds up. $10 for Zoom, $12.50 for Slack, etc. etc. As a developer / consultant working in many different languages on a few platforms, I'm spending close to $2000 for subscriptions each year. It's a bit much.

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

#202

Post by walterbell »

gregjwild wrote: post #186
walterbell wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Online reading enables tracking, the data has value.

Data has value, but not as much value as repeat customer loyalty.

Yes, the comments in this thread provide valuable data, if the O'Reilly marketing department has the appropriate parser.

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

#203

Post by bigtunacan »

peterarmstrong wrote: post #51

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…

I stopped using Leanpub as soon as you started charging author's an upfront fee of $99 PER BOOK to even start writing a book on your platform.

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

#204

Post by chrsw »

ivanr wrote: post #145
chrsw wrote: post #138

The last couple of O'Reilly books I purchased from Amazon were of poor quality. The content was fine but the physical item was shocking. They were probably print-on-demand books made on the cheap. But the retail price was what you'd expect from a high end tech publisher. I should have returned them. The books look like they were printed on a consumer grade inkjet. I had heard that the books purchased directly from O'…

Yes, they're print-on-demand books, printed by Lightning Source (the last time I checked). They're not cheap to print, at least not at the list price; I don't know what deal O'Reilly might have. However, they're vastly more convenient because Lightning Source will ship them directly to retailers so publishers don't need warehouses. If I'd have to guess, I'd say that O'Reilly might be printing a small initial batch fo…

I'm surprised to hear that the print-on-demand books aren't cheap. I know you're getting flexibility with print-on-demand, which has value, but if the quality is so much worse than traditionally printed books (in my experience)... is it really worth it for a publisher the size of O'Reilly? I guess that's a question only they can answer. If people want to buy print-on-demand books, that's fine. It's just not for me, I'd like the option of paying more for a standard of quality I find acceptable. Not enough people are willing to do the same, sadly.

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

#205

Post by stephanakib »

I am writing from Pearson and have seen a lot of queries about where can folks find DRM-Free PDFs of technical books now. I want to share that informit.com, a Pearson eCommerce site, sells DRM-Free PDFs from our imprints Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall, Sams, Cisco Press, Microsoft Press, New Riders, Que, and Peachpit.

informit.com/store/eBooks

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

#206

Post by MonkeyIsNull »

AndyHunt wrote: post #149
ChickeNES wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't buy another Pragmatic Press book after buying the Practical Vim second edition Kindle book only to find that the cursor positions are missing throughout the entire book. I posted on their forums about it only to be told that they had submitted the update and it was out of their hands. It's now been a year and a half and the update still hasn't appeared, and as I waited for the non-existent update to appear, I…

I'm very sorry to hear that. But unfortunately, support was correct. We can't control when -- or IF -- Amazon ever ships an update that we provide. If you buy from us directly, we ship out updates to books regularly. In this case, if you email me directly, I'll email you the latest version of that book by hand. Also, for anyone who wants to own individual ebooks, please help yourself to this coupon: iLoveEbooks, good…

Yeah, this is why I always buy direct from you guys. You do a bang up job of rolling out updates.

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

#207

Post by starsinspace »

stephanakib wrote: post #205

I am writing from Pearson and have seen a lot of queries about where can folks find DRM-Free PDFs of technical books now. I want to share that informit.com, a Pearson eCommerce site, sells DRM-Free PDFs from our imprints Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall, Sams, Cisco Press, Microsoft Press, New Riders, Que, and Peachpit. informit.com/store/eBooks

Are the PDF eBooks watermarked?

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

#208

Post by starsinspace »

AndyHunt wrote: post #192

Well, O'Reilly seems to be focusing on the large, corporate market, with a broad array of topics, so from that perspective this move makes perfect sense as a small, simple optimization on their part. At Pragmatic Bookshelf, however, we focus on the individual, highly skilled developer looking to improve their skills and those of their teams. We don't offer a broad array of tech topics, just the ones we feel are impor…

Question: do you consider giving up on the soft-DRM (watermarking of PDFs) too?

Lack of DRM (both soft and hard) was for me the biggest feature when buying from O'Reilly. It's what made it quite unique and why I bought most of my tech-related eBooks there. I had a somewhat unpleasant surprise when I bought books directly from your website and found them to be watermarked. Didn't see that written anywhere on the site before I purchased...

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

#209

Post by MonkeyIsNull »

gregjwild wrote: post #168
chris_wot wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yes. And thus why this will fail. I want to read O'Reilly books as PDFs. Properly typeset PDFs. And I don't want to buy from anyone other than O'Reilly. And I tried Safari, but it's not the same as reading their books as PDFs.

Here at Manning we plan to keep selling beautifully typeset .PDFs & other formats for many years to come :)

Thanks - it's the only format that I can read code in. I will be throwing more moola your way because of this.

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

#210

Post by clumsysmurf »

_oya8 wrote: post #165
clumsysmurf wrote: post #7

This is devastating ... I don't have the income to justify $399/yr for Safari subscription. "the growth of membership on Safari far exceeds the individual units previously purchased on oreilly.com" ... that doesn't explain why the two options couldn't co-exist. "In addition to giving our customers the choice and convenience they expect" ... no, they just took away the choice and convenience I expect. Over time, I've…

We (Manning) are in the process of diversifying our options :)

This sounds somewhat ominous ... will Manning keep the option of DRM-free individual book purchases going into the future?
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