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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

#101

Post by throwaway2048 »

EwanToo wrote: post #59
kqr2 wrote: post #48

I can understand their decision to stop selling print books, however, since they are still selling safari, why not continue to sell individual ebooks? Is the infrastructure and maintenance that much different?

This is surely the unspoken element of O'Reilly's change here, piracy of technical PDFs is rampant.

If you think this makes piracy harder in any way, you are badly mistaken.

It only takes one person to "break" whatever protection there is on the content, its almost entirely irrelevant just how much protection is on that content, because only one person needs to go through the process.

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

#102

Post by youngtaff »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #21

O'Reilly author here. This is the email we got today. Sounds like they also plan to offer courses through Safari as well. ------------------------- I'm writing to let you know about some changes—including new opportunities for you—at O'Reilly. First, as of today, we are discontinuing fulfillment of individual book and video purchases on shop.oreilly.com. Books (both ebook and print) will still be available for sale v…

O'Reilly is becoming a less and less interesting company to work with but it's not surprising

After-all this is the company that's built a multi-million dollar conferencing business that doesn't pay speakers, and often doesn't meet their travel and hotel costs

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

#104

Post by rahimnathwani »

This sucks. I've been a subscriber to Safari Books Online for a couple of years. Whilst I like being able to reflow text, and in general the reading experience is good, some books just looked screwed up when reading them in the Queue app or the Safari web site.

For example, some of the equations in 'Hands-on Machine Learning with Tensorflow' aren't rendered to images properly. They probably look fine in the print and PDF versions of the book, but I don't get those as a Safari subscriber. I get an HTML version with equations rendered to images, without anyone checking the quality.

Amazon does sell 'print replica' editions of some books, which are as good as PDFs if you are OK reading within the Kindle app, but IIRC that's not the case for O'Reilly books, which are only available as HTML-ish versions.

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

#105

Post by bambax »

pacaro wrote: post #26
kin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon sells Kindle versions so there's DRM. But, Google Play store offers PDF and ePub versions of O'Reilly books.

Whether there is DRM on a kindle book is the publishers decision. For example, none of Tor Books' titles have DRM which means you can extract the beautiful screen resolution illustrations from Brandon Sanderson's books. Disclaimer: I work for Amazon, but not on anything Kindle related

Is there a way to know which Kindle books have DRM, and which don't, before purchase?

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

#106

Post by ChickeNES »

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…

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 couldn't get a refund.

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

#107

Post by ldjb »

bambax wrote: post #105
pacaro wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether there is DRM on a kindle book is the publishers decision. For example, none of Tor Books' titles have DRM which means you can extract the beautiful screen resolution illustrations from Brandon Sanderson's books. Disclaimer: I work for Amazon, but not on anything Kindle related

Is there a way to know which Kindle books have DRM, and which don't, before purchase?

There's no easy way to tell, as far as I know. Some books will mention they're DRM-free in the description, but that's not always the case. There are DRM-free books with no such indication until you've actually purchased them.

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

#109

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #21

O'Reilly author here. This is the email we got today. Sounds like they also plan to offer courses through Safari as well. ------------------------- I'm writing to let you know about some changes—including new opportunities for you—at O'Reilly. First, as of today, we are discontinuing fulfillment of individual book and video purchases on shop.oreilly.com. Books (both ebook and print) will still be available for sale v…

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 example of a business with a reputation for treating its customers with respect deciding to trash that reputation by treating its customers and content developers as livestock that can be farmed and sweated.

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

#110

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #21

O'Reilly author here. This is the email we got today. Sounds like they also plan to offer courses through Safari as well. ------------------------- I'm writing to let you know about some changes—including new opportunities for you—at O'Reilly. First, as of today, we are discontinuing fulfillment of individual book and video purchases on shop.oreilly.com. Books (both ebook and print) will still be available for sale v…

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