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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

#141

Post by bryanrasmussen »

delhanty wrote: post #133

Giving the authors zero prior notice - that's rude! As a long-term buyer of lots of O'Reilly ebooks - it's disappointing, but it's their prerogative if they want to exit the market. It's not like we entered into some lifetime contract where they agreed to sell me ebooks forever. From O'Reilly 's point of view, this looks rational though. Joel Spolsky [1] and Jeff Attwood [2] called it in 2008: >What is stackoverflow.…

frankly I've found the utility of my oreilly membership has definitely increased over the last few years as the utility of Stackoverflow and Google searching on an issue has declined. However it's true that I don't buy physical books very much anymore, and definitely not physical technical books.

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

#142

Post by andre_m »

martinkl wrote: post #130
sjcole wrote: post #95

Folks, www.eBooks.com is still selling O'Reilly titles without DRM. Prices might be less competitive than Amazon, but we're not Amazon. http://www.ebooks.com/subjects/computers/

I just looked up my own O'Reilly book on ebooks.com. http://www.ebooks.com/95729334/designing-data-intensive-appl... I can't see anything about DRM on the page, but under "supported devices" it says "e-readers with Adobe Digital Editions installed". Isn't that DRM enforcement software? Could you clarify please? Edit: this page explicitly says that readers need to be compatible with Adobe DRM https://support.ebooks.co…

I am not sure if your book is DRM protected – if you browse the books at ebooks.com, you will see that ebooks.com is selling books in "EPUB/PDF format" and „secure EPUB/secure PDF format“. Furthermore please take a look at https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/205639205-Insta...: Most of the ebooks available to download from eBooks.com (but not all) are protected by Adobe DRM…

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

#143

Post by chris_wot »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #93
SomeHacker44 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subscription services like Netflix are cheap. Vastly cheaper than Safari. Furthermore, Netflix allows two viewing streams simultaneously, 24 hours a day, and all five members of my household have their own profiles. We almost certainly spend more hours as a family on Netflix than we do reading O'Reilly books (especially since it's mostly just me who does that, and sometimes my son when we're doing programming togethe…

The economics are different, Safari is a niche product and will always be more expensive than something aimed at the general consumer.

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.

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

#144

Post by jefe_ »

Have had Safari Books Online for about a year now, got it 50% off last August, love it. There have been several books I started reading in SBO and then ordered physical copies on Amazon. Never even occurred to me to order the books from Safari directly. The books I order are about broad topics and themes (Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Enterprise IoT, etc.). Rarely would I order a book about a specific Language or Framework, they have a limited shelf-life, but I'll absolutely reference the online versions to grab the info I need (more valuable format, can have open on monitor, search, etc.). Their process for alerting authors of this change may not have been great, but it seems like a smart business decision (assuming my use case if fairly typical).

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

#145

Post by ivanr »

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 for each book, switching to exclusively POD once the run has depleted.

Source: I also use Lightning Source for my tiny publishing operation. Yes, the quality is not the same as the traditionally printed books, although personally I don't think they're that bad (those I've seen, anyway). In my case, as a small publisher, I would never be able to afford to operate warehouses profitably, because we only have a couple of books. We actually tried, but it was too expensive and time consuming at low volumes. We also stopped selling paperbacks, because it's very difficult to complete on the shipping costs with the likes of Amazon.

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

#146

Post by larrik »

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'…

My O'Reilly books going back to 2000 or so are all perfect bound, so this lay-flat binding change must not have been recent.

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

#148

Post by Zigurd »

larrik wrote: post #146
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'…

My O'Reilly books going back to 2000 or so are all perfect bound, so this lay-flat binding change must not have been recent.

Almost everything that doesn't sell thousands of units a month, and hardly anything does anymore, is print-on-demand.

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

#149

Post by AndyHunt »

ChickeNES wrote: post #106
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…

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 for 30% off at pragprog.com.

Thanks,

/\ndy

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

#150

Post by fs111 »

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…

wait for black friday, they usually run a half price discount then. Bought my membership then and it renews for the same price.
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