No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me • Hacker News Board

Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#101

Post by antod » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 12:19 AM UTC

giantrobot wrote: post #52

The moment O'Reilly went subscription-only they lost me as a customer. I have a huge library of O'Reilly books I've purchased as PDFs. Shit I've got a huge library of print O'Reilly books despite years of slimming down. It really sucked because I've been learning from O'Reilly books for thirty years. But I've become fundamentally opposed to DRM on media and subscription-only access is the ultimate DRM. I don't have a…

Yeah me too. The only recent O'Reilly books I have came from humblebundle specials.

I've also been pretty disappointed with their quality and/or usefulness lately. They seem to just cover stuff in a less technical vague high level way now. Hopefully that's just a sampling error on my part.

Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#102

Post by bsder » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 12:23 AM UTC

zdragnar wrote: post #90

seg_lol wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UW bookstore in Seattle like many big science schools had a wondrous technical book section. Isles of Springer. The bookstore itself is a shadow of its former shelf.

My own college experience heavily soured me on both book stores and especially school run book stores. The markup was obscene and their buy back rates were worse. Half price books and a few other book stores lulled me back a few times, but nonfiction books are kept around mostly as eye candy at this point.

All the US universities outsourced their bookstores.

Now I can't even walk in and browse what books the various departments are using for classes, anymore. Everything is now behind bars and completely inaccessible.

Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#103

Post by Mistletoe » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 12:37 AM UTC

roadside_picnic wrote: post #66

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.

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…

This makes sense, "enough" of the old technical info is in the AI brains now and easily accessed via a query.

Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#104

Post by zx8080 » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 12:50 AM UTC

senderista wrote: post #91

roadside_picnic wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ada's these days is more about politics than technology.

What kind of politics? I mean, what do they sell, little to no tech books?

Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#105

Post by smartbit » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 1:03 AM UTC

28304283409234 wrote: post #87

tombert wrote: post #3

I get the O’Reilly subscription through the ACM. It’s an extra $75 a year after a regular ACM membership. A lot less than $500/year.

Every year O'Reilly has a cybermonday disccount of 40%. https://www.oreilly.com/online-learning/2025-cyber-sale.html...

One year, many years ago, they had an Cyber Monday offer for $299 indefinitely. I took it.

Reading this and thinking of my consumption I start wondering if it is still worth it

Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#106

Post by bencornia » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 1:08 AM UTC

giantrobot wrote: post #77

daveoc64 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do still sell all of their books - just not directly on their website. Whenever possible, they're sold without DRM.

Which is fine but they ruined their direct DRM-free sales. You used to get access to a PDF, epub, and mobi version of a book with no DRM. They even conveniently allowed you to sync your purchases to Dropbox. It was awesome. Now you have to hope something g you're interested in ends up in a Humble Bundle or something. The situation is worse in every way for a end users.

It would be such a dream if I could get an ebook, pdf, and physical copy. I love O'Reilly books and have been lucky to have access the last few years because of school.

Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#107

Post by marai2 » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 1:14 AM UTC

roadside_picnic wrote: post #66

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.

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…

Same with the Stanford university bookstore. Was one of the better bookstores in the Bayarea. Used to have a whole room of technical, science, math books. It too is a shadow of its former self. So sad.

Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#108

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 1:20 AM UTC

seg_lol wrote: post #82

roadside_picnic wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The UW bookstore in Seattle like many big science schools had a wondrous technical book section. Isles of Springer. The bookstore itself is a shadow of its former shelf.

[deleted]

Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#109

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 1:28 AM UTC

richard_todd wrote: post #99

Lately I just ask an LLM to teach me things interactively. It will be interesting to see if that stops working so well, when authors stop writing books for LLMs to absorb. Maybe as long as there is some kind of canonical reference, the LLM can bridge the gap to decent educational material. If so, that's kind of sad, but also kind of awesome at the same time. It's definitely an interesting time to be alive. I wish I w…

[deleted]

Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#110

Post by falcor84 » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 1:28 AM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #96

falcor84 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Imagine you own a factory that makes plastic widgets. The factory has a widget-making machine. You'll pay rent on the factory and interest on the loan you took out to buy the widget-making machine whether you make one widget or a million. But the amount you'll spend on plastic and machine operator wages goes up the more widgets you want to make. So you can plot a line, y=mx+c where y is the amount you spend and x is…

Did you just write a short lesson to explain the difference between capex and opex? Well... thank you, I guess.

But again, the question is: is it ever rational for a functional unit manager to be given a particular maximum opex budget and not be allowed to capitalize a part of that? What benefit would such a restriction offer to the business?