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No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

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Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#61

Post by falcor84 »

thfuran wrote: post #59
falcor84 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's just some peculiarity I'm missing, but wouldn't a smaller capex sum be a pareto improvement over a larger opex? Is there any way in which denying the suggestion was rational?

Yes, spending less money is better than spending more money (though there can be potential tax treatment differences or other complexities depending on exactly how money is spent), but that doesn't mean the person in charge of approving an employee's expense is authorized to approve expenses however they please. If they're given a budget that says they get X money in one category and Y money in another, they can't sp…

To be clear, my question was about whether there is a situation where it is rational from a management accounting perspective to define a unit's budget like this.

Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#62

Post by roadside_picnic »

> Unfortunately, I cannot read technical books fast and definitely not fast enough to make the subscription be worth $500 per year.

For me I find the $500 to be a pretty clear win as far as value goes. My shelves are already overflowing with, while not "timeless", much slower aging technical books. But quite often, throughout a year, I'll want a deeper dive into a current topic than I can get from online resources + Claude. Quite often that dive involves wanting to look through multiple books (even if only using a few chapters).

I know I'm a dying breed, but, while I love AI for interactive exploration and learning, I find books more valuable in the era of endless YouTube tutorials and AI slop blog posts. Technical topics benefit from "big picture" thinking that basically doesn't exist in modern short-form web content.

Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#63

Post by GrinningFool »

mindcrash wrote: post #21

For me one of the best ways until now to get good quality IT books is (believe it or not): Humble Bundle ( https://www.humblebundle.com/ ) The past year they featured bundles from (quickly out of my head): O'Reilly, MIT Press, Manning, Pearson, Pragmatic Programmers and No Starch Press. Oh, and Packt. But I left that one out because the quality of most Packt books is total shit (IMO). It's the next best thing besides…

I was once asked to review a Packt book on a subject I knew well. Not only did it contain many factual errors, I wasn't allowed to point them out for correction - they rejected those suggestions. As I recall they wanted my free labor just to review presentation and basically rubber stamp it.

Have never bought from Packt since.

Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#64

Post by cultofmetatron »

adamors wrote: post #24
whenc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It went un-noticed here, I think, but The Pragmatic Bookshelf recently fired most of its staff and are taking on no new books. In the email they sent to authors, they quoted a 40% YoY fall in non-fiction sales, industry-wide.

Wow, would be interested to read more about this, could you submit the email maybe as its own post? Even as a text version, I actually love the PragProg, would hate to seem them gone (but I guess it’s a foregone conclusion).

I love pragprog but I think nonfiction books in dead tree form is going away. YEs, I know there are people who will pay for a physical book, just not enough to make for a profitable business.

I myself spend around 200-300 usd on books every year. but I haven't bought a physical book in almost a decade. a pdf is perfectly fine. just sell it to me without DRM and have content thats worth the premium over wading through blogs.

How can these companies move forward and update their business model? Personally, I pay for manning's subscription. $24/month all you can eat. I would love more of these publishers switching to a netflix style model.

I consume a lot of short form technical content via blogs. would love a site where I can find medium written content with editorial oversight and quality control for technical correctness. obviously this costs money and it would be worth it to pay for that. I already do with manning. most of the content I consume are MEAPS. bleeding edge stuff that would likely be out of date by the time it makes it to dead paper form.

This would be advantageous to the publishers as well. this shifts the focus to put the content on the web and mobile in ways that are easy to access. The publishers also get data on what gets consumed informing what technical resources to commission.

Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#65

Post by uxcolumbo »

whenc wrote: post #15
cauliflower99 wrote: post #13

Anytime I'm asked for feedback via the O'Reilly website (I manage the business account for my company), the first thing I always say is that the app is unusable. I've tried it on my Amazon Fire Tablet, Ipad, different phones - it doesn't work. The user metrics in O'reilly (and probably most learning apps) has floored in the last 12 months. I see they've launched a new AI platform now. They're definitely going in a di…

It went un-noticed here, I think, but The Pragmatic Bookshelf recently fired most of its staff and are taking on no new books. In the email they sent to authors, they quoted a 40% YoY fall in non-fiction sales, industry-wide.

That's a shame. I got an email from them suggesting that they had a tough year.

I bought 2 books even though I won't have time to read them anytime soon.

Hopefully they'll find a way to keep going.

Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#66

Post by roadside_picnic »

whenc wrote: post #15
cauliflower99 wrote: post #13

Anytime I'm asked for feedback via the O'Reilly website (I manage the business account for my company), the first thing I always say is that the app is unusable. I've tried it on my Amazon Fire Tablet, Ipad, different phones - it doesn't work. The user metrics in O'reilly (and probably most learning apps) has floored in the last 12 months. I see they've launched a new AI platform now. They're definitely going in a di…

It went un-noticed here, I think, but The Pragmatic Bookshelf recently fired most of its staff and are taking on no new books. In the email they sent to authors, they quoted a 40% YoY fall in non-fiction sales, industry-wide.

As an avid reader (and sometimes writer) of technical books, it's sad to see the, perhaps inevitable, decline of the space. I still remember in the early 2000s Barnes and Noble would still have massive shelf space devoted to every technical topic you could imagine. I could spend hours just exploring what languages and topics there were I didn't even know existed. Powell's Technical Books used to be an entire separate store filled with books on every technical topic imaginable.

The publishing industry veterans I've worked with told me it was even more incredible during the height of the dotcom boom: book sales in the 100,000 copy range was not that rare.

Today I can only think of two truly technical book stores that still exist: The MIT Press Bookstore in Cambridge, MA and Ada Books in Seattle, WA. The latter, while a delightful store, has relegated the true technical book section to the backroom, which unfortunately doesn't seem to get refreshed too often (though, part of the beauty of this is it still has many of the weird old technical books that used to be everywhere).

Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#67

Post by j45 »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #62

> Unfortunately, I cannot read technical books fast and definitely not fast enough to make the subscription be worth $500 per year. For me I find the $500 to be a pretty clear win as far as value goes. My shelves are already overflowing with, while not "timeless", much slower aging technical books. But quite often, throughout a year, I'll want a deeper dive into a current topic than I can get from online resources +…

Books still activate a different part of the brain than reading on a screen, including e-ink, so it's not you or a dying breed, people may turn out to not learn as deeply or as quickly.

Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#68

Post by joshvm »

DannyPage wrote: post #11

You can quite often get a $300 yearly sub to O'Reilly, they run a discount ~4 times a year. That said, like a lot of other content subscriptions, it can be quite anxiety inducing to make it seem like you're getting your money's worth. I've gotten the sub via my work, and I think the labs and videos are quite good, plus the occasional opportunities to do live-chats with the authors. But you have to sift through a lot…

Also check if you're in education at any level. Most university libraries subscribe to what used to be Safari and you can SSO the full (enormous) catalogue. I didn't realize this for quite a long time as it's not widely advertised. There are ton of books that aren't the traditional animal-drawing tech titles, including Manning, as well as some lecture series.

But the app is pretty kludgey and it's way more locked down than other publishers who will give you chapter PDFs.

At least it's a good way to skim books to see if they're worth buying a physical copy.

Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#69

Post by roadside_picnic »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #46
tjr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this because people seek knowledge from LLMs rather than from books now? Or is it because LLMs know everything that is in books, so people don't feel compelled to learn any more themselves?

Definitely isn't the latter. Numerical Recipes and Hacker's Delight have tons of gems that you won't get from an LLM, or that an LLM will even understand despite appearing all their training sets.

Even before LLMs became big I started hording solid technical books, as there was so much misinformation on Google/SO that any non-trivial technical question could not be answer without a high probability that the answer was fundamentally wrong.

LLMs are super helpful for learning, but without the foundation of a true textbook at your side they will very easily go off the rails into a world of imagination.

Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#70

Post by vittore »

Goofy_Coyote wrote: post #28
vittore wrote: post #14

If you are in Bay area, San Francisco Public Library (sfpl.org) gives you access to O'Reilly for free, if you have library card, while it does not improve on usability issues, at 0 cost it is phenomenal resource.

My two problems with access through libraries is lack of app access, and that every time I login, all my progress is gone (not reset to cover - gone gone), and I have to find the resource again, open it and go to the page/time I was at. Also can’t create my own playlist or favorites. At least my library acts like that.

Same for SFPL. Majorly annoying.
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