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

My favorite approach is when the author makes the book available online, but still sells the PDF and physical book. An example of this is Exploring ES6 [0]. As a user, it has tons of benefits.

Before Amazon dominated the book space, it used to be that you could go to a book store and browser through a book before you bought it. That way you could do a quick check to confirm it has what you're looking for. But with paywalled digital books you can't do that. For technical books this can be very frustrating, since you might be looking for something more advanced, while the book barely touches on the subject. Having the book available online means you can browse first.

Heck, I wouldn't even mind paying first, if online companies had better return policies. If I get a book and a few minutes in I realize it wasn't what I was looking for, I want to be able to get a refund without having to send 20 back-and-forth emails with customer support. In some cases I just pirate the book, and after giving it a browse, I'll decide to either buy or trash it. Whenever a book is good or helpful, I'm happy to pay because I understand people need to survive. On top of that, it's also in my best interest as a reader that the author continue producing amazing content.

Last perk of having the book freely available online is you can access it anywhere without having to install or login to anything. If you lose your copy, or you're at work you wanna check something... It's really easy to pull up the browser. In addition to that, you can also link coworkers to references in the book, which might get them to buy the book as well.

[0] http://exploringjs.com/es6.html

For example, the page you (re)open to has a tiny font(s) size(s). Scroll away from it, and you get a readable font size. Scroll back, and that page is tiny, again. Sometimes, it takes scrolling to the start of the next section to get the normal font size. Or the previous section, or page. Anyway, everytime you relaunch the app and pick up where you left off, that page has a tiny, unreadable font size. My fix for it now is to pop the table of contents popup/list, find and go to the previous section, and then scroll forward to the page I was at.

I also like to read on it with a dark background and light text. Sometimes the border is dark, as well -- as expected and desired. Other times, it's white -- its brightness decreasing readability. Solution for this? Kill and relaunch the app. I've noticed some vague sense of correspondense of this behavior with how I'm using/opening/reopening the app at the moment the undesired behavior occurs, but I haven't defined it fully and keep forgetting what I do happen to notice.

There are other irritations -- also longstanding ones in the web interface. Those are the ones I happen to remember, at the moment.

Anyway, I like having access to the library -- although more and more new titles seem not to be O'Reilly nor Addison-Wesley or the like, but what seem to be more "second tier" titles.

At the same time, if I'd taken the dollars spent on Safari and just bought titles, well... I'd have a lot of titles that will never "go away" on me.

P.S. I have the "traditional" O'Reilly subscription. I gather there is now a second type of subscription and app. Unlimited local downloads (accessible only through the app), unlike the 3 or less at a time that the "traditional" subscriptions provide. And some sort of epub or somesuch format that may allow some more formatting choices O'Reilly wanted or somesuch. But a more limited selection of titles, and no titles that insist upon other formats, such as the Addison-Wesley titles. So I gather, second-hand.

Anyway, I'm talking about the "traditional" subscription and corresponding Android app.