161–170 of 180 posts
I've concluded exactly the same! It's far more cost effective to buy individual books than paying for the subscription. Hard copies can also be sold if I decide not to keep them, which offsets costs even more
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.
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 dow…
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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.
I had kinda suspected this just based on my own experience of paper vs screen, but hadn’t run across any research. After seeing your comment I went looking! I found this interesting: https://phys.org/news/2024-02-screens-paper-effective-absorb...
There's some others about learning more from writing with pen on paper compared to tablet or taking notes digitally typing.
I am a digital note taker at heart but can't deny using a notebook still has better outcomes sometimes.
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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.
Yes, I was so disappointed with my visit last year - not yet hopeless, but close to it. Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle is a better place.
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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.
They can't have even lost money if people were just claiming to own books to get the cheap price. Their marginal cost for the PDFs was effectively zero so at $5 they were making plenty of money on them. At the time a PDF only copy of their books was about $10.
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Yes, I was so disappointed with my visit last year - not yet hopeless, but close to it. Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle is a better place.
Elliot Bay is a shadow of what it used to be when it was in Pioneer Square.