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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

#241

Post by Oletros »

Finnucane wrote: post #151

A few weeks ago O'Reilly sold its interest in the Pubfactory platform and the developers who work on it to Sheridan, a printing services company (presumably Sheridan wants to beef up its own digital portfolio). Whether this is cause or effect here, I couldn't say, but it would seem to be related. One makes a guess that as digital delivery becomes a bigger part of the pie for them, the cost of managing physical invent…

> One makes a guess that as digital delivery becomes a bigger part of the pie for them, the cost of managing physical inventory becomes more burdensome to them

But they also are ditching selling ebooks

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

#242

Post by [deleted] »

cstejerean wrote: post #70
clumsysmurf wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are significant problems with both options. For Amazon, when you buy an eBook, you are essentially given a license to use it. Amazon can revoke that - we've all heard of people moving to another country to see their entire library disappear, only (hopefully) remedied after enough hell was raised on some website. As for Play Books, lets imagine you are a Android developer working on the next great thing, and you…

If you are an Android developer it seems like it may be a good idea to use a dedicated Google account for Android development and keeping that separate from your personal email account that you use for Gmail, etc.

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

#243

Post by 0xTJ »

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.

I prefer the model with Matlab, where you pay once, get a year of updates, and keep the last version.

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

#245

Post by stephanakib »

rollover wrote: post #237
stephanakib wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they are watermarked for security

A digital watermark is automatically inserted customer information into a purchased product to restrict it's usage only to the buyer of that product. To me that's exactly like Digital Rights (Restrictions) Management. Calling something that contains digital watermarks DRM-free is deceptive to the customer. But long story short, if it contains watermarks I don't buy it.

The watermarks are discreet w/ no other information than your name. The PDFs require no passwords and can be loaded on up to 6 different devices. We have tried to come up with a solution that provides for the customer, but protects our authors' content as well. But certainly I can understand your point of view.

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

#246

Post by rollover »

stephanakib wrote: post #245
rollover wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A digital watermark is automatically inserted customer information into a purchased product to restrict it's usage only to the buyer of that product. To me that's exactly like Digital Rights (Restrictions) Management. Calling something that contains digital watermarks DRM-free is deceptive to the customer. But long story short, if it contains watermarks I don't buy it.

The watermarks are discreet w/ no other information than your name. The PDFs require no passwords and can be loaded on up to 6 different devices. We have tried to come up with a solution that provides for the customer, but protects our authors' content as well. But certainly I can understand your point of view.

They don't protect anything. Probably 90% of your catalog is out there on the net and findable with a bit of googling. In the end it's just a bad business decision. You scare away potential customers and your stuff gets pirated anyway. You're degrading your own product and artificially creating a situation where the pirated product is actually a better one (one without a watermark) than the one you are legally selling. You've got to realize how insane that is.

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

#247

Post by yellowapple »

Frogolocalypse wrote: post #239
kronos29296 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The DMCA is an american law. Last time I looked, I don't live in america.

Per the wise words of a certain German musical group: we're all living in America.

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

#249

Post by chris_wot »

gregjwild wrote: post #168
chris_wot wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here at Manning we plan to keep selling beautifully typeset .PDFs & other formats for many years to come :)

I LOVE Manning! You are amazing and I will keep spending my hard earned money on your books.

I bought your Spring books, and a few others. Next time I want to buy a book, I'll go straight to Manning and not O'Reilly.

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

#250

Post by [deleted] »

AndyHunt wrote: post #149
ChickeNES wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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