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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

#221

Post by nightski »

chasing wrote: post #155
nightski wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure it's to the version that is 12 months behind when you stopped subscribing. You have to subscribe for an entire year to own the version when you started. So if you subscribe for 12 months, and then cancel, you actually have to revert back to a version 1 year old. It's pretty messed up. Plus the updates have REALLY been lacking. They have missed the quarterly releases regularly and it just feels like ve…

> So if you subscribe for 12 months, and then cancel, you actually have to revert back to a version 1 year old. It's pretty messed up. It would be, but that's not how it works. I believe you just get to keep using whatever you were using when you stopped payments. You have access to minors updates to that version, but not to major updates from version to version. I think it's a smart balance.

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

Read that again. It's exactly how it works.

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

#222

Post by [deleted] »

codewithcheese wrote: post #121
nightski wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure it's to the version that is 12 months behind when you stopped subscribing. You have to subscribe for an entire year to own the version when you started. So if you subscribe for 12 months, and then cancel, you actually have to revert back to a version 1 year old. It's pretty messed up. Plus the updates have REALLY been lacking. They have missed the quarterly releases regularly and it just feels like ve…

Your essentially paying for the product at the time of your payment and a 12 month subscription to updates. From that point of view it makes some sense that once your subscription is finished you revert back to the original product you bought you when subscribed. It does seem unnecessarily punitive though.

[deleted]

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

#223

Post by chasing »

nightski wrote: post #221
chasing wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if you subscribe for 12 months, and then cancel, you actually have to revert back to a version 1 year old. It's pretty messed up. It would be, but that's not how it works. I believe you just get to keep using whatever you were using when you stopped payments. You have access to minors updates to that version, but not to major updates from version to version. I think it's a smart balance.

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What... Read that again. It's exactly how it works.

You are correct! Sorry for the bad info.

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

#224

Post by gglitch »

justanton wrote: post #196
gglitch wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Tough call. I'm not at all unsympathetic to the variety of very good reasons why someone would prefer a pile of DRM-free files they own and can do with what they please. In this case, for me, it doesn't matter much; I have a Kindle on which I'd never try to read a technical book, so whether I read a pdf in Preview or a website in Firefox I'm kind of indifferent to. All else being equal, it seems to me that the web offers much more flexibility in design than a pdf, which must, at the end of the day, have standardized "pages," that don't necessarily correspond well semantically to the content.

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

#225

Post by tracker1 »

tomku wrote: post #199
chasing wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 propriet…

For me it was even worse, their mobile app's cache would bork fairly frequently, and the app would misbehave until I cleared it, and on android, it isn't exactly an accessible option, you have to go through layers of settings menus, scroll forever for the app you're looking for to finally clear it. Third time it happened, I cancelled my Safari account.

I want to like Safari as an option, but it's way too limited for me. Frankly I'm only buying 2-3 books a year now, mostly relying on technical articles or online documentation (bad as that may be). I may go through another burst reading 8-10 books over a summer again, but not at the moment.

Although this change doesn't affect me, I mostly bought print books via Amazon anyway, because I find digital copies harder to recall/work through.

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

#226

Post by gmiller123456 »

15charlimit wrote: post #169
kronos29296 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is totally illegal by the way.(I think due to DMCA)

Effectively does not matter if you aren't distributing. Format shifting shouldn't be illegal, regardless.

>Effectively does not matter if you aren't distributing. While publishers don't usually go after end users, they do very often go after the people who make and/or distribute the tools. So, just because you can remove the DRM today doesn't mean you will be able to tomorrow. And it usually means you're downloading and running software on your PC by someone who is not deterred much by something being illegal.

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

#227

Post by grad_ml »

gregjwild wrote: post #218
grad_ml wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wanted to add, I absolutely love manning tech book's quality. After buying few books from packt, I'm never going back to them.

Always good to hear positive feedback :) Thanks! Any particular books you've enjoyed recently?

I'm in first few chapters of Relevant search book. So far, great!

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

#228

Post by stephanakib »

starsinspace wrote: post #207
stephanakib wrote: post #205

I am writing from Pearson and have seen a lot of queries about where can folks find DRM-Free PDFs of technical books now. I want to share that informit.com, a Pearson eCommerce site, sells DRM-Free PDFs from our imprints Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall, Sams, Cisco Press, Microsoft Press, New Riders, Que, and Peachpit. informit.com/store/eBooks

Are the PDF eBooks watermarked?

Yes they are watermarked for security

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

#229

Post by alexott »

grad_ml wrote: post #213
_oya8 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We (Manning) are in the process of diversifying our options :)

Just wanted to add, I absolutely love manning tech book's quality. After buying few books from packt, I'm never going back to them.

Completely agree - but have been several times a tech proofreader I know amount of work that it required

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

#230

Post by alexott »

hdra wrote: post #5

That sucks. Especially when "Amazon or your favorite retailer" is not even available where you live. How many technical book does one read in a year anyway? The $399/year subscription model doesn't make sense unless your employer is paying for it.

Even with subscription, you can't read these books on Kindle if you want. I bought a lot of books from them, that I often load to old kindle to read during vacation, without having access to internet, or other distractions
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