Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

oreilly.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 260 posts

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

#191

Post by tomku »

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…

Strongly recommend buying PragProg books directly from them rather than through Amazon. They update their books much more often than other publishers and (as you experienced) Amazon really drags their feet on pushing out those updates, even when they're critically important.

There's other benefits too, like coupons for free or heavily discounted upgrades when new editions of the book are published. I bought the first edition of "Practical Vim" back in 2012 and I've gotten five years of free updates including the second edition.

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

#192

Post by AndyHunt »

Well, O'Reilly seems to be focusing on the large, corporate market, with a broad array of topics, so from that perspective this move makes perfect sense as a small, simple optimization on their part.

At Pragmatic Bookshelf, however, we focus on the individual, highly skilled developer looking to improve their skills and those of their teams. We don't offer a broad array of tech topics, just the ones we feel are important.

We focus on readers who like to collect and own their books, DRM free in epub, mobi, and PDF formats (you get all three for one price, and can re-download forever, or as long as we're in business ;)

It's a different market, and a different approach.

So don't go hating on O'Reilly for this move—if it doesn't suit you, you're not their market. And that's okay. It's a big world.

/\ndy Publisher, Pragmatic Bookshelf

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

#193

Post by JPKab »

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'…

The Kindle mobi books have issues too. For whatever reason, Amazon thinks it's acceptable to sell mobi books where the code samples are barely legible on a Kindle paperwhite.

I've had this issue with some O'Reilly and Manning titles ported purchased from Amazon in Mobi format.

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

#194

Post by clavalle »

I would love a subscription service -- if they offered a books-only option with PDFs at a reasonable price.

I don't need tutorial videos or any of that other crud, I need books.

If I could get all the high quality programming books I want for $15 I wouldn't think twice.

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

#195

Post by tonyedgecombe »

j_s wrote: post #153
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How different are the operating costs? What is cost-per-user? Is the smaller audience just an excuse to squeeze for more net revenue?

From the businesses perspective what it costs doesn't matter (as long as they cover their costs), it's about what value the customer perceives and hence how much they are willing to pay.

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

#196

Post by justanton »

gglitch wrote: post #184
justanton wrote: post #172

I am a Safari subscriber, however I use it only for quick reference or for watching videos. I've never read a whole book on Safari only for one reason: the HTML formatting in the browser (as well as in the Queue app) is terrible. It still amazes me, how a publisher such as O'Reilly, who by definition should be aware of importance of such things as typography, almost entirely neglected this in Safari. Books in Safari…

I'm puzzled by this. I'm reading /Introducing Elixir, 2nd Edition/ online right now in Firefox on a Mac, and it looks fantastic. Beautifully formatted.

I've just checked this book on Safari — it seems it indeed doesn't have the issues I've experienced while reading on Safari, like spacing between the letters in a word, tons of whitespace in weird places and poor image quality.

That means that overall quality of books ranges on the platform.

May I ask you, would you still prefer a Safari version of this book over, say, a PDF?

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

#197

Post by lucaspm98 »

chasing wrote: post #157
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…

> Buy it once, own it. Did you ever see me subscribe to Safari? No? Ever wonder why not? For the same reason that I don't use Adobe products anymore except Lightroom... I like subscriptions, to be honest. I don't need to "own" all this stuff (whatever "own" might mean) -- tech books and specific versions of software tend to have a relatively short shelf-life and I like both O'Reilly's, Adobe's, and JetBrain's models…

It's honestly just a personal preference which model you prefer more. I can respect a business choosing either model, but ideally having both options is the best.

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

#198

Post by gregjwild »

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 someone can't pirate "X in a Nutshell", they'll pirate "Learning X". Either way, nobody is getting their money. No point losing customers over it.

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

#199

Post by tomku »

chasing wrote: post #157
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…

> Buy it once, own it. Did you ever see me subscribe to Safari? No? Ever wonder why not? For the same reason that I don't use Adobe products anymore except Lightroom... I like subscriptions, to be honest. I don't need to "own" all this stuff (whatever "own" might mean) -- tech books and specific versions of software tend to have a relatively short shelf-life and I like both O'Reilly's, Adobe's, and JetBrain's models…

I don't mind subscriptions, but a key difference between O'Reilly's subscription model and Adobe/Jetbrains is that my Jetbrains and Adobe subscriptions (both of which I'm happy with!) get me access to the exact same thing I used to pay hundreds of dollars a year for, just on different terms.

Safari is quite radically different from the O'Reilly products I used to pay for. I'm forced to use a browser or their proprietary mobile app to read the books. Only the mobile app support offline reading. It's a completely different value proposition - it costs much more than I would normally spend on O'Reilly ebooks each year, but it would get me access to many more tech books than I'd normally buy or read. Unlike ebook purchases, if I stop subscribing I lose access to everything.

I think it ends up being a good value if you reference a wide variety of books and a very poor one if you have narrower interests. I'd be more interested if they offered a plan that fit my usage profile. I don't care about access to thousands of books with no restrictions, I'd be happy to have access to maybe two to four full books (of my choosing) at a time for a more modest monthly fee. Maybe a credits system like Audible? I think there's a lot of ways to design an ebook subscription service that are more customer-friendly than forcing everyone into an expensive all-or-nothing choice.

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

#200

Post by loudouncodes »

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…

Kindles are horrible for tech books. I buy books directly the the pragprog website and they automatically appear in my Dropbox as PDF (there is a choice of format). My books auto-update with typo fixes, etc. automatically.
Post reply on HN