24 ms·

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

233 points by stock_toaster 9y ago

ddrum001 9y ago
Having purchased many books thru O'Reilly, and now using Safari Online - I'm a huge fan of this move. Feels to me like going from iTunes to Spotify, or Netflix DVDs to Streaming.
- hdra 9y ago
  I'm not. I purchased many books from O'Reilly as well, but the number is more like 4-5 books a year. Even with just 4-5 books a year I still usually end up with a book left unread or unfinished every time. Spotify/Netflix makes perfect sense for a subscription model because of the way we consume musics/videos. The same can't be said for technical books. Not for $399 a year anyway. With that price point, seems like they are hoping to get employers to pay for it.
  - tebruno99 9y ago
    They are also gambling that they are worth it and that you can't live without them vrs the competition. Which now with DRM only option, the competition just moved into first place.
  - throwaway7645 9y ago
    Bingo...i was thinking the same thing.
    - ianai 9y ago
      Either employers or they're hoping people will just "suck it up". For this to really work, they need to drop the price to Netflix/Spotify levels of 10/month.
  - ddrum001 9y ago
    I guess I'm an anomaly in that I read far more books than watching movies, but I agree that most consumers will want a variety of music and shows, unlike books. However, isn't the price point ($35/month), which is 4x more than Spotify, roughly in line with the price for a single book, which is roughly 4x an album. I guess the main difference is not that the price ratio between subscription and individual items is off, but rather that most consumers don't want 1 book a month. It's a bummer that they don't give people an option, but I'm still a fan of Safari...and I hope this move will mean they drastically improve the Safari app, much like Netflix has doubled down on Streaming now that they don't do DVDs.
    - hdra 9y ago
      I read books far more than I do watching movies or tv shows as well, but I don't include technical books in my count. I read general books for entertainment, and maybe learn one or two mundane things that I don't know before. I read maybe 2-3, sometimes 4 books a month for entertainment. When I read technical books, its going to be because there is a specific thing that I want to learn, and when I'm done with the books, I expect to have a new skill under my belt that I can start polishing. I certainly don't do this at a rate of 1 book a month. Yeah, the fact the pricing is offered at rate that is way more than most people's (including mine) purchasing habit is a bummer, but the inclusion of DRM meaning that you lose access to your "purchase" once your subscription ends is the deal breaker for me. The fact there is a lot more content in the Safari offering may look like a good value in the marketing copy, but that just means more noise to filter through for me. I only have limited amount of time to spend on consuming content after all.
manaskarekar 9y ago
This really sucks. It was my favorite place to buy books. It seemed like the one place that had the model closest to being right. - They used to have an ongoing discount of 45% and more on special holidays. - They were DRM free in multiple formats and they gave you discounts on ebooks if you had purchased the print books. - They had regular updates to ebooks posted in one single list that you could keep up with. I wish I had purchased all the books on my wish-list before this was announced. The Safari subscription model makes no sense to my use-case. I guess that makes Informit.com and No Starch Press my goto book stores. Also Manning and Apress, but their selection is weaker.
- throwaway7645 9y ago
  I like NoStarchPress, but Manning has waaaay more books.
  - billpollock 9y ago
    Good books take time. We're not in a rush to make lots of them.
    - manaskarekar 9y ago
      Thank you for nostarchpress. Also thank you for the humble bundle, please keep them coming!
    - throwaway7645 9y ago
      I agree. I own fantastic books from both NoStarch and Manning and a few from O'Reilly to name a few publishers (I really like tech books). I check NoStarch about once a month to see if there is something new on the horizon and unfortunately there's usually not a huge amount. Manning's MEAP program usually has 25+ books in the works and there are at least 5 I'm waiting on. Tldr; I wish NoStarch published more of their great books.
  - gregjwild 9y ago
    And many more to come! We're always on the hunt for new tech to teach in our books (and now videos) No Starch are great too though. I own a few myself :)
dcw303 9y ago
I just posted this on another thread: I just got this via email and I'm very disappointed too. DRM issues aside, Kindle is still terrible for tech books. Code samples, data tables, etc. They all look crummy. The pdf ebooks from the Oreilly store had far superior formatting.
- kin 9y ago
  Google Play store offers O'Reilly books DRM free in both PDF and ePub format.
  - michaelmrose 9y ago
    Its amazing that a company whose main product is search has such a worthless search for their store. Its absolutely worthless unless you already know exactly what you want. You have to use their general search product to find enough info to bring up the exact title you want to buy. For example you can't on the play store find all the oreilly books that aren't drm encumbered or find all the books on a certain topic in a certain range of years directly via its interface.
    - padthai 9y ago
      Not only the store, Youtube and Scholar do not provide a good search experience either. I wonder why. In fact I remember that when Youtube got adquired by Google search got worse.
  - voltagex_ 9y ago
    How? I just bought "You don't know JS: Up and Going" (only $5, so not bad as a test) and I was prompted to download Google Books. I have stopped buying Kindle books due to no longer being able to back up the files (KFX switched to a new encryption type). I rarely buy technical books, but O'Reilly was my go-to due to actually being able to have the real files offline. Edit: Okay, Google don't make it easy and there's no way to do it from Android. Go to https://books.google.com.au/books https://books.google.com.au/books and click on a book in your library. If the publisher has allowed it, there'll be a cog in the upper right corner that will have "Download PDF" and "Download EPUB" available.
hdra 9y ago
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.
- alexott 9y ago
  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
clumsysmurf 9y ago
This is devastating ... I don't have the income to justify $399/yr for Safari subscription. "the growth of membership on Safari far exceeds the individual units previously purchased on oreilly.com" ... that doesn't explain why the two options couldn't co-exist. "In addition to giving our customers the choice and convenience they expect" ... no, they just took away the choice and convenience I expect. Over time, I've favored different formats based on what devices I have owned, and bugs in the apps themselves (OS X 10.11 Preview had terrible PDF rendering for non-retina devices). So there goes my choice on what I want to buy when, and what format to use where. I hope this doesn't encourage InformIT, Manning, PragProg or RockyNook to go down these roads. Until then, I guess they will get my money.
- throwaway2016a 9y ago
  They aren't stopping all retail. Just direct to consumer sales. Amazon and brick and mortar stores will still sell O'Reilly books. Edit: I am uncertain of the eBook / PDF offering at other retailers.
  - detaro 9y ago
    Amazon selling PDFs? Brick and mortar selling PDFs?
    - kin 9y ago
      Amazon sells Kindle versions so there's DRM. But, Google Play store offers PDF and ePub versions of O'Reilly books.
      - detaro 9y ago
        > Google Play store offers PDF and ePub versions of O'Reilly books. Oh, interesting, I wasn't aware of that. Thanks!
        nmusatti 9y ago
walterbell 9y ago
Are O'Reilly PDFs available through retailers? Through Safari?
- pan69 9y ago
  I can't tell for sure but it seems to be on the bandwagon of; pay for what you don't use and what you pay for you don't actually own.
dawnerd 9y ago
Lots of outrage but the important thing here is they'll still be available from other retailers. They're not forcing you to buy a subscription to get the books.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  The problem is other retailers don't offer the DRM-free ebooks that O'Reilly was. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. all DRM them to heck. Going forward, the only time I'm gonna be buying O'Reilly ebooks is when they're on Humble Bundle.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Oletros 9y ago
  1. Books were DRM free and in various formats. I could use the PDF in my computer and the epub in my ebook reader or tablet. 2. There were discounts when registering the purchased printed book 3. There were discounts for newer editions of a book
troydj 9y ago
One of the things I'll miss is the "upgrade a registered O'Reilly print book to an ebook for $4.99" option. Always nice to have both the print and [affordable] ebook versions. Bummer.
- myth_drannon 9y ago
  Manning gives that you for free
  - douche 9y ago
    That and their daily half-off sales have resulted in me spending far too much money on their books... At least they generally have good editing and a pretty high quality bar, better than I've seen with Packt or Apress.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - gregjwild 9y ago
      Glad to hear you've enjoyed our stuff. We really do try to do a good job with it! :)
  - gregjwild 9y ago
    We also allow eBook customers to upgrade to a print book for $12 plus shipping - https://www.manning.com/ebooks https://www.manning.com/ebooks
michaelmrose 9y ago
In case it might help anyone many libraries pay for a subscription to safari books. For example the Seattle library system provides free access to safari books to all card holders. Seattle library cards are available not only to anyone in who works, lives or owns property in seattle/king county but also those who have a card in one of several surrounding county library systems. Further non-resident cards may be had for $85 a year. Unlike having a personal account you cannot download items for offline viewing, can't access video training, and can't access books in progress. Still this provides access to the bulk of the material you may want to read.
- ianai 9y ago
  Can you essentially only read the books from the library website?
  - michaelmrose 9y ago
    Years ago I wrote up a quick script using imacros and calibre to create epubs based on the documents available from safari. I would consider this fair use format shifting. Legal opinions probably vary but this was essentially indistinguishable from just reading the book so long as the script didn't grab a page per second and pretty easy to do.
- asdefghyk 9y ago
  RE "....many libraries pay for a subscription to safari books....." It is only a subset of the Oreilly ebooks. NOt all of them ....
torstenvl 9y ago
Deeply disappointing. O'Reilly had some really good things going for it, and it just decided to flush it down the drain. This is on par with Apple moving to butterfly switch keyboards across its entire laptop line, or Netscape deciding to ditch its browser and rewrite it from scratch. Tragic, user-hostile blunders. And it wouldn't completely surprise me if this marked the beginning of the end for O'Reilly.
- SomeHacker44 9y ago
  (It's the "touch bar" that made this my last Apple laptop until they get rid of it, but true, the keyboard is pretty darn bad too.)
  - heartbreak 9y ago
    Isn't that an optional feature?
    - kalleboo 9y ago
      Only on the 13-inch, and even there the non-TouchBar version has some lame limitations (e.g. only 2 USB-C ports and slower WiFi)
    - yellow_postit 9y ago
      Sadly no, it's forced on every pro model except the lowest spec one.
- avuton 9y ago
  You remember a different Netscape than I do. Netscape was the kind of browser you hated to recommend to a loved one. The experience was truly subpar. When Firebird was announced, the user experience improved significantly over what Netscape could have ever hoped to attain, though it still took some time before recommending it to a loved one would turn out not to be a mistake.
  - torstenvl 9y ago
ilamont 9y ago
One other thing worth mentioning: Publishers (and authors) were notified of the change today. It's akin to an app store suddenly announcing a major shift in the business model and payouts to app developers, effective immediately. For my company, the single-title sales are often greater than Safari subscription income, and I am not sure sending visitors to Amazon is going to make up for the lost sales on O'Reilly. I would have much preferred if O'Reilly sent customers directly to my publisher's website, for people who want to purchase PDFs or ebooks from other vendors besides Amazon. Reading utility nonfiction/technical titles are not the same as binge-watching Netflix or plugging into a Spotify playlist all day. Readers have very specific needs and learning priorities, and the all-you-can-eat model doesn't work for everyone.
- TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
  I actually really like Safari books online, the all-you-can-eat subscription style matches my usage perfectly. My experience has been that most technical books aren't worth reading cover to cover, but many make for great references. When researching certain technical topics, I just open dozens of books and skip straight to the relevant sections.
  - clumsysmurf 9y ago
    But even if you like the subscription model, you are forced to consume the content a certain way. If I wanted to read on my Android tablet, presumably I'd use the Safari app ... which barely has a mediocre rating. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.safariflow.queue&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.safariflow...
    - TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
      Yeah, I agree with you. I dislike that aspect of the service. 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 http://exploringjs.com/es6.html
throwaway2016a 9y ago
O'Reilly author here. This is the email we got today. Sounds like they also plan to offer courses through Safari as well. ------------------------- I'm writing to let you know about some changes—including new opportunities for you—at O'Reilly. First, as of today, we are discontinuing fulfillment of individual book and video purchases on shop.oreilly.com. Books (both ebook and print) will still be available for sale via other digital and bricks-and-mortar retail channels. Plus, every book and video will still have a product page on oreilly.com, offering customers two options for getting the content they want: Safari membership (starting with a free 10-day trial) and, for books, a "buy from Amazon" button. Why the change? It's clear that we're in the midst of a fundamental shift in how people get and use content. Subscription services like Spotify and Netflix are the new norm, as people opt for paying for digital access rather than purchasing physical units one by one. We've already seen this in our own business—the growth of subscribers on Safari far exceeds the individual units previously purchased on oreilly.com. That's the reason for the change. And with Safari, O'Reilly is uniquely positioned to give our customers the choice and convenience they expect. When we launched Safari back in 2001, we knew we were investing in the future of publishing, and today, that future is here. Since 2014, when O'Reilly became sole owner of Safari, we have refocused our business around its potential as a membership platform. It's working—just this week, Outsell Insights published a report on Safari that gave us a "Strongly Positive" rating and noted that, "Safari shows that continuous reinvention through the addition of new tools onto a solid content base provides an extremely strong foundation on which to build a business. As an example, it also shows the kind of timescales necessary to build a strong reputation for quality content, one on which a more tools-focused solution is possible." That's where "new opportunities for you" come in. We've developed successful new products like Live Online Training and video Learning Paths, available exclusively on Safari, and we have more in the works. We'll be in touch soon with more information about these new ways we can work together on Safari. And of course, we will continue to publish books and videos that are available both as stand-alone products and on Safari.
- wavefunction 9y ago
  "including new opportunities for you" I'll be the judge of that
kin 9y ago
The $399/yr doesn't make sense for a lot of people. It definitely is too high a price point for me as I only read 1 or 2 O'Reilly books a year at most. It's nice to have a copy lying around for reference years later. On the flip side, I totally understand them going DRM-only for digital publishers. O'Reilly PDFs are way too easy to find for free with minimal Google-fu.
- nathanasmith 9y ago
  The DRM won't change the availability of O'Reilly books on pirate sites in the least.
- kronos29296 9y ago
  Only thing that will change with DRM is less Google-fu and more Pirate-fu which people with good google-fu also have in abundance.
  - swiley 9y ago
    Yeah there's absolutely no way I would ever pay for something with DRM. This will end up going the way the textbooks went.
- starsinspace 9y ago
  > On the flip side, I totally understand them going DRM-only for digital publishers. Has the introduction of evermore draconian DRM in movie disc formats prevented them from appearing on pirate sites?
  - Spivak 9y ago
    Does DRM claim to accomplish that? Sure, they appear eventually but it does slow people down and raises the technical knowledge bar required to do so.
kqr2 9y ago
Does anyone know how this will affect previous ebooks purchased via O'Reilly? Will you still be able to login and access the digital books or do you need to download all of them before a certain date?
- runevault 9y ago
  They say you will still be able to access stuff you already bought for life. You certainly already can access them as I logged into my account to check.
manicdee 9y ago
"Seeing as 40% of our customers buy pink things, we are reducing costs by selling only pink things." The whole point if going to O'Reilly was DRM free books that I can use on my various devices (iPad, Sony Reader). Guess it's off to Apress in the future. Can't load Kindle or Kobo books into the Sony.
- stephanakib 9y ago
  FWIW informit.com has the same model. We have regular holiday sales, update our eBooks, and offer the different DRM-Free formats including PDFs. Informit.com is a Pearson owned site and sells the following tech imprints: Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall, Sams, Microsoft Press, Cisco Press, Pearston IT Certification, Big Nerd Ranch, Peachpit, Adobe Press, and New Riders.
michaelmrose 9y ago
Amazon is a terrible place to buy books. Its difficult to discern which books are encumbered by drm and further even if the publisher provides the book drm free its damn difficult to get at the unencumbered ebook file. I bought such a book and spent an hour of my life and talked to 3 separate employees and the best I could do was a refund after talking to 3 apathetic employees. As far as I'm concerned there is not one thing good about the entire platform. I hate the reader, I hate their tablets, I hate their ebook store, I hate their reader app. They don't provide a damn thing that isn't inferior to other options and have no particular benefit to helping you use their wares in an open fashion. They are only interested in options which lock you to their platform. Its as if walmart was only interested in selling you dvds that work only in terrible walmart branded dvd players that require you to use walmarts subscription service instead of netflix.
- SomeHacker44 9y ago
  I don't mind buying pure-text books from Amazon. That basically means novels. I don't even mind the DRM so much, as I read the book once and then don't really care, and because I have almost never had problems with the fact that I have literally over a dozen Kindle devices and Kindle-app running devices. However, technical, computer, electronics, physics and math books are almost all uniformly terrible from Amazon (or even epub). These are long-term references that need a proper print layout option (PDF) and be unencumbered by DRM. A 2002 edition of Mastering Regular Expressions is virtually totally applicable today, 15 years later - but imagine if I had bought this in a DRM'd Sony version, or a Palm .prc (now part of Amazon)? I'd be SOL.
Lendal 9y ago
I'm a Safari online subscriber myself, but I think this decision is a huge mistake. I also own books that I purchased from O'Reilly and I still use those books. Just because I don't continue to re-purchase them doesn't mean I don't use them or will never purchase another. I use them on a daily basis. I also use Safari on a daily basis. Why can't they see that there is a need for both models? I rent things, and I own things. Just because I rent some things doesn't mean I want to rent everything. By the same token, just because I buy things every day doesn't mean I never want to rent anything. We are truly living in the Idiocracy.
- ianai 9y ago
  I just don't understand the business choice. It's not like this will push people onto the safari books program. If anything, I worry that this portends the end for them.
- walterbell 9y ago
  Online reading enables tracking, the data has value.
  - gregjwild 9y ago
    Data has value, but not as much value as repeat customer loyalty.
    - walterbell 9y ago
      Yes, the comments in this thread provide valuable data, if the O'Reilly marketing department has the appropriate parser.
trustfundbaby 9y ago
This is disappointing. Amazon doesn't let you buy pdfs, which I prefer over epubs.
gamesbrainiac 9y ago
This does not come as a surprise. Packt now has Mapt, and subscription based services such as Pluralsight are showing far healthier profit margins than O'Reilly. This is just their attempt to get in line with what other publishers are offering.
kqr2 9y ago
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?
- EwanToo 9y ago
  This is surely the unspoken element of O'Reilly's change here, piracy of technical PDFs is rampant.
  - subpixel 9y ago
    The thing is, by making pdfs harder to get through legit channels they are going to increase traffic through illegitimate channels. It's not about how many files are available, it's about how many people are looking for them.
    - jamespo 9y ago
      Not if they stop making PDFs full stop
      - kronos29296 9y ago
        Yeah stop book photocopying by not publishing books is the best way to do it. Then they are no longer book publishers just another website with a premium subscription.
        chris_wot 9y ago
        People like me will just publish directly to gitbook
  - throwaway2048 9y ago
    If you think this makes piracy harder in any way, you are badly mistaken. It only takes one person to "break" whatever protection there is on the content, its almost entirely irrelevant just how much protection is on that content, because only one person needs to go through the process.
peterarmstrong 9y ago
This is very disappointing. When discussing the space, I liked to point at O'Reilly, Manning and the Prags as examples of tech publishers that did a good job directly selling ebooks. I've bought many books from all three of them. (Disclosure: Manning author twice, Leanpub co-founder.) Now, at Leanpub we're going to be rolling out our own courses in the next couple months, so we agree with O'Reilly that there are lots of great ways to produce and distribute learning material. However, the book is the best, most general and timeless way. We're committed to selling DRM-free ebooks in PDF, EPUB and MOBI directly from on our own site for the long term. The ebook world should not just give up and sell everything through Amazon. I like Amazon--they do a great job of focusing on customers, I have Amazon Prime, and I'm really happy that Jeff Bezos is a good owner for the Washington Post. But we should not let Amazon become the only seller of ebooks. Stay tuned for something else we're planning in this regard in a few weeks...
- bigtunacan 9y ago
  I stopped using Leanpub as soon as you started charging author's an upfront fee of $99 PER BOOK to even start writing a book on your platform.
SomeHacker44 9y ago
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 with O'Reilly himself or any of the executives at O'Reilly. I sure as heck am not going to buy any technical books from O'Reilly by Amazon. The things I liked from O'Reilly, now gone, are: 1. PDF, ePub and Mobi formats, all DRM free, so I could read them in the ideal format for each device I read them on. And, I have a lot of devices: several Macs and PCs, several iPads, several Kindles (used almost exclusively for fiction as technical works are horrible in non-PDF), several phones of various kinds. I could put both the ePub and PDF into iBooks (not my favorite app, but it does sync) and read the ePub on the subway if I wanted, and the PDF on the desktop and iPad (cause, as I said, ePub is terrible for technical books). I like my fully properly typeset color, indexed PDFs! 2. 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 (which is still a purchase not a subscription), and why I dropped JetBrains when they moved to their subscription model and then re-joined them when they went to "Subscription + keep your start of subscription version forever". I don't rent stuff. I buy it and own it. Plain and simple. I'm glad that there are other publishers out there like Pragmatic Press and Apress that have been publishing good content, because you just lost a highly dedicated customer who always shopped O'Reilly first even for non-O'Reilly books. Congratulations, and shame on you.
- pirocks 9y ago
  Random question: What did you switch to when you dropped JetBrains, and did you notice a productivity drop?
  - reitanqild 9y ago
    Former user of Eclipse an IntelliJ, now Netbeans: For some people (like me) Netbeans is awesome. I love the fact that it can use pom as its own project model and IMO it aligns better with OS keyboard shortcuts (Win and Linux at least) than VS, eclipse and IntelliJ). Be prepared for weird reactions though: it seems everyone "knows" it is awful.
troydj 9y ago
Maybe if we all start sending tweets to @timoreilly he will reconsider this very unfortunate decision...
- rexreed 9y ago
  From what I understand he hasn't been making day-to-day decisions for O'reilly for at least 10 years. He's just the owner and figurehead.
dyukqu 9y ago
Music and film (a.k.a. Spotify & Netflix) are entertainment means. Books are not - especially the technical ones. You can buy a Netflix and Spotify subscription and stream them 24/7 without the need for paying attention. How could they expect people to buy a subscription for $399 and be happy/ok/cool about it? You cannot "stream" books. I'd feel I have done a dead investment. I doubt it will be a successful strategy even for half of the current subscription cost.
tebruno99 9y ago
I've cancelled my Safari subscription and moving everything over to Apress. This is definitely a very sad day. I own every O'Reilly book ever published DRM Free and still had Safari, but never again. Apress, Informit, and Packtpub you are now #1, BE #1, stay customer first.
vk3000 9y ago
For those of us deeply disappointed at O'reilly discontinuation of PDF ebooks, I've started an "idea" on O'reilly's support website to bring them back: http://support.oreilly.com/oreilly/topics/bring-back-pdf-ebooks http://support.oreilly.com/oreilly/topics/bring-back-pdf-ebo... Hopefully, if it gets enough upvotes, they'll consider it.
flor1s 9y ago
I don't know how the math works, but ACM members currently get free access to Safari. You can sign up for ACM for $99 a year.
- guu 9y ago
  Isn't this a subset of the full safari library?
  - flor1s 9y ago
    It used to be, but currently it seems to be the complete catalog.
newscracker 9y ago
I'm terribly disappointed, and that's putting it mildly. I have bought many eBooks from O'Reilly and have also provided feedback repeatedly that the main reasons I buy from O'Reilly are DRM free books in different formats (especially PDF and ePub, which I use). It's the same set of reasons I buy books from Apress, Pragprog, NoStarch, Packtpub and Manning (to name a few others). I have tried Safari Online through an employer subscription, but I just cannot get used to reading long books on a browser and hence don't use it (don't even talk about apps on other platforms). I need my books in specific formats that I can use in book reading apps across different platforms. I don't like being connected all the time just to read a book. For me reading books is mostly an offline-like activity (except if I have to search about something online). Books are also very different from other kinds of media that are more of an ephemeral nature, like music, movies, TV shows, etc. Though many technical books might become outdated quickly, there are many books that do contain almost timeless pieces of information and wisdom. I don't buy books on Amazon. I don't buy books in Apple's iBooks store. There is no way to know upfront if something has DRM or not. I don't like supporting DRMd content for books. O'Reilly, if you're reading this, your decision to stop selling eBooks like you used to is a very poor one for your readers. You may end up making more money from unused Safari subscriptions, but you won't have the fan following you had before. As for comparisons with Pluralsight, I despise such models that are filled with DRM and restrictions. To Apress, Pragprog, NoStarch, Packtpub, Manning and others - please do not change your models and remove DRM free eBooks in multiple formats from your stores. I, for one, will stop buying whenever something like that happens. Subscription models are very poor in user experience and don't provide adequate freedom to read whenever/wherever.
- billpollock 9y ago
  No worries. We're not changing the way we do business at no starch. Just working to do better.
- gregjwild 9y ago
  We (Manning) have no intention of ceasing DRM free book distribution. If anything, we're in the process of diversifying ways you can consume our content :)
chx 9y ago
I contacted customer support and they had this to say: > We currently have the Kindle versions of our title available on Amazon.com and the ePub version at Google Play or IBooks for your mobile devices. We do not currently have the DRM free PDF versions available from any online re-sellers.
BurritoAlPastor 9y ago
Here's something interesting to know - O'Reilly's online store wasn't an in-house operation. They contracted with an ecommerce company called MarketLive, and then all the ebook stuff was an extensive (and, as far as I know, tightly-coupled) customization. But all the add-to-basket and order-processing and order-confirmation-emails stuff was through MarketLive. This is significant because early last year MarketLive was purchased by private equity, merged with some other ecommerce companies, and relocated to Texas. So it's quite possible - and here I have no particular knowledge - that the MarketLive platform is being deprecated or entirely abandoned, and this was a more attractive option for O'Reilly than trying to rebuild all that stuff on a different platform.
- toyg 9y ago
  O'Reilly have always been pretty transparent with their readers; I'm sure if they'd come clean on this people would have given them the benefit of the doubt. "Sorry, in a few months we are scaling down the website because our supplier is borked, bear with us." Man, I'm sure someone would have helped them for free / cheap. Trying to cover a supplier issue with bullcrap about "market trends" is not great; doing it from one day to the next is just terrible for customer relationships.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    Why can't both things be true? It could very well be the case that they would have been happy to carry on with the market if it still all worked, but they didn't feel like they could justify the trouble of migrating it to a new platform.
foobardeveloper 9y ago
Is there any alternative to Safari Books Online which has both beginner and advanced content, video and books ? (If yes, I want to move away from Safari on grounds of principle)
- stephanakib 9y ago
  Informit.com is a Pearson owned site and we sell the following tech imprints for all levels: Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall, Sams, Microsoft Press, Cisco Press, Pearston IT Certification, Que, Big Nerd Ranch, Peachpit, Adobe Press, and New Riders. We have regular holiday sales (including a 4th of July sale starting tomorrow), update our eBooks, and offer the different DRM-Free formats including PDF, MOBI and EPUB.
  - sjcole 9y ago
    The same is true of eBooks.com.
micheljansen 9y ago
Sad news. O'Reilly were one of the few publishers that used my preferred model: buy the paper book and add the eBook version for $10 extra or so. Best of both worlds.
Oletros 9y ago
So, no more DRM free ebooks, no more multiple format ebooks and Safari subscription cannot be used offline and cannot be used out of their apps. 349 euro is a very steep price Difficult to buy more O'Reilly books From the blog post: > That’s clear even among the largest, most stable corporations: a few years ago, a study predicted that 40% of today’s Fortune 500 companies won’t exist in a decade. Perhaps this move is the first step to be one of the 50% disappearing
sjcole 9y ago
Folks, www.eBooks.com is still selling O'Reilly titles without DRM. Prices might be less competitive than Amazon, but we're not Amazon. http://www.ebooks.com/subjects/computers/ http://www.ebooks.com/subjects/computers/
- ivanr 9y ago
  Interesting. How much do you charge per book sold (e.g., as a percentage of the list price)? Also, do you collect consumer taxes for the EU (and other countries that require them)?
- martinkl 9y ago
  I just looked up my own O'Reilly book on ebooks.com. http://www.ebooks.com/95729334/designing-data-intensive-applications/kleppmann-martin/ http://www.ebooks.com/95729334/designing-data-intensive-appl... I can't see anything about DRM on the page, but under "supported devices" it says "e-readers with Adobe Digital Editions installed". Isn't that DRM enforcement software? Could you clarify please? Edit: this page explicitly says that readers need to be compatible with Adobe DRM https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/214119286-Guide-to-ebook-reader-devices https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/214119286-Guide...
  - andre_m 9y ago
    I am not sure if your book is DRM protected – if you browse the books at ebooks.com, you will see that ebooks.com is selling books in "EPUB/PDF format" and „secure EPUB/secure PDF format“. Furthermore please take a look at https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/205639205-Installing-Adobe-Digital-Editions-ADE-on-your-computer https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/205639205-Insta...: Most of the ebooks available to download from eBooks.com (but not all) are protected by Adobe DRM…
fsloth 9y ago
Does anyone know why they're killing PDF? Seems insanity to me, it's the only digital format I find suitable for consuming technical books.
rahimnathwani 9y ago
This sucks. I've been a subscriber to Safari Books Online for a couple of years. Whilst I like being able to reflow text, and in general the reading experience is good, some books just looked screwed up when reading them in the Queue app or the Safari web site. For example, some of the equations in 'Hands-on Machine Learning with Tensorflow' aren't rendered to images properly. They probably look fine in the print and PDF versions of the book, but I don't get those as a Safari subscriber. I get an HTML version with equations rendered to images, without anyone checking the quality. Amazon does sell 'print replica' editions of some books, which are as good as PDFs if you are OK reading within the Kindle app, but IIRC that's not the case for O'Reilly books, which are only available as HTML-ish versions.
vixen99 9y ago
This is dreadful and such a disappointment from a company I'd praised to others for their service.
timwaagh 9y ago
well i mostly bought their titles from bookstores in deadtree format so it does not really affect me. as long as they continue to publish good stuff and the bookstores have their books (which has become more of a problem lately) i will probably buy a few once in a while. still this is a most unwelcome deterioration. it just puts them in the category of companies that like to squeeze every dollar out of their users, which is not good because they used to enjoy a very good reputation which justified their high pricetag.
chippy 9y ago
It's clear O'Reilly is struggling. I personally know some authors, and they have made some great books, but I've not bought much from them for around 10 years. They seem to have dropped from my radar. I no longer hear from my friends that they are publishing their books with O'Reilly. Also, O'Reilly produced and ran a number of excellent quality conferences (ETech anyone?) These disappeared a long time ago. I also remember them sponsoring a whole range of meetups and smaller conferences with books given out for free being quite common. O'Reilly has changed, and they need to change too. Perhaps the internet and search engines have overtaken technical books in general? Perhaps in seeing their market share decrease over the years they need to make drastic changes to adapt?
bearsnowstorm 9y ago
I'm sure I'm not their biggest customer, but I have bought in the hundreds of dollars worth of books each year from O'Reilly for the last few, consumed as DRM free PDFs. Definitely going to re-evaluate that. When I want to buy a book on a topic I used to Google "O'Reilly <insert topic here>" as my first port of call. That just ended. I'll look to other publishers first instead, and cease recommending O'Reilly.
- dcminter 9y ago
  Why would their Safari service not be suitable for you if you prefer to consume their content as PDFs anyway?
  - dcminter 9y ago
    Oh, looking at their site, I now see that it's a substantially different cost and set of constraints than those that applied when I allowed my subscription to lapse. Disregard.
ekidd 9y ago
I've bought well over a hundred O'Reilly books over the years, and after 2002 or so, I bought almost all of them as DRM-free PDFs. But in recent years, I've only averaged an O'Reilly book or two per year, because they've been slow to publish books on new technologies I cared about. I find that, with few exceptions, Kindle programming ebooks are annoying and unpleasant. Some of the "textbook"-mode ones (where you can highlight diagrams and not just text) are tolerable on a Chromebook in tablet mode, but just barely. And there's no way I'm going to pay $399/year for Safari, not when I'm currently spending $0-50/year, and certainly not for the privilege of using what people tell me is a mediocre mobile app. So going forward, this means that I'll buy maybe one O'Reilly book every other year through Amazon. Does this also mean that O'Reilly is no longer going to be offering "early release" books for people who don't buy Safari? I think that something like 90% of my technical book purchases in the last 10 years were early release.
delhanty 9y ago
Giving the authors zero prior notice - that's rude! As a long-term buyer of lots of O'Reilly ebooks - it's disappointing, but it's their prerogative if they want to exit the market. It's not like we entered into some lifetime contract where they agreed to sell me ebooks forever. From O'Reilly 's point of view, this looks rational though. Joel Spolsky [1] and Jeff Attwood [2] called it in 2008: >What is stackoverflow.com? >Nothing, yet. >But here’s the concept: >Programmers seem to have stopped reading books. The market for books on programming topics is miniscule compared to the number of working programmers. Then they made doubly sure by making SO a huge success! In music publishing, most of the money in the mainstream has moved from music sales to live performances, with streaming subscriptions bring up the rear. Isn't the same thing likely happening here with O'Reilly's conference business probably dwarfing everything else? [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/04/16/stackoverflowcom/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/04/16/stackoverflowcom/ [2] https://blog.codinghorror.com/programmers-dont-read-books-but-you-should/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/programmers-dont-read-books-bu...
- bryanrasmussen 9y ago
  frankly I've found the utility of my oreilly membership has definitely increased over the last few years as the utility of Stackoverflow and Google searching on an issue has declined. However it's true that I don't buy physical books very much anymore, and definitely not physical technical books.
chrsw 9y ago
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'Reilly didn't have this problem. They've even taken away that option now. Looking back, this had to be expected. The writing was on the wall when they switched from a lay-flat binding for most or their titles to the cheaper, much hard to read while coding, perfect binding.
- ivanr 9y ago
  Yes, they're print-on-demand books, printed by Lightning Source (the last time I checked). They're not cheap to print, at least not at the list price; I don't know what deal O'Reilly might have. However, they're vastly more convenient because Lightning Source will ship them directly to retailers so publishers don't need warehouses. If I'd have to guess, I'd say that O'Reilly might be printing a small initial batch for each book, switching to exclusively POD once the run has depleted. Source: I also use Lightning Source for my tiny publishing operation. Yes, the quality is not the same as the traditionally printed books, although personally I don't think they're that bad (those I've seen, anyway). In my case, as a small publisher, I would never be able to afford to operate warehouses profitably, because we only have a couple of books. We actually tried, but it was too expensive and time consuming at low volumes. We also stopped selling paperbacks, because it's very difficult to complete on the shipping costs with the likes of Amazon.
  - currysausage 9y ago
    My "JavaScript Definitive Guide" ordered from Amazon.de (and printed by Lightning Source UK, if I recall correctly) was of shocking quality too. I returned it and got a more expensive copy from my local bookstore, printed by Lightning Source International. Very sharp type.
    - ivanr 9y ago
jefe_ 9y ago
Have had Safari Books Online for about a year now, got it 50% off last August, love it. There have been several books I started reading in SBO and then ordered physical copies on Amazon. Never even occurred to me to order the books from Safari directly. The books I order are about broad topics and themes (Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Enterprise IoT, etc.). Rarely would I order a book about a specific Language or Framework, they have a limited shelf-life, but I'll absolutely reference the online versions to grab the info I need (more valuable format, can have open on monitor, search, etc.). Their process for alerting authors of this change may not have been great, but it seems like a smart business decision (assuming my use case if fairly typical).
leopld 9y ago
Completely threw me off when I got the email. Safari Books Online is really expensive, and I dislike seeing private entrepreneurs reinventing public libraries (and even selling it as an innovative concept).
Finnucane 9y ago
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 inventory becomes more burdensome to them. So they said, screw it, we'll join the Borg and be assimilated. (Personally, I get access to the Safari online service through the library at work, so I don't have to worry about it too much).
- Oletros 9y ago
  > 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
tomku 9y ago
I used to buy a lot of O'Reilly ebooks, always DRM-free directly from them. I thought they had a great business model and they published quite a few excellent books. They've slowly lost me as a customer over the past few years as those two characteristics have disappeared. Other publishers have more consistent quality, better coverage of new tech and better pricing. This just adds "access to DRM-free downloadable files" to the list of things that other publishers do better. It'll be interesting to see how having all of their digital content locked behind Safari will affect their ability to attract authors. Maybe it'll work out well for them overall, who knows.
a3n 9y ago
I watched premier computer bookshops die -- SoftPro's disappearance in the south Denver area was so sad for me. This was a somewhat long process; there was a period where we were wringing our hands about the physical computer book stores disappearing. But there was O'Reilly, other smaller but equally good online vendors, and also rans. I think now we're seeing the start of the same decline and disappearance of online outlets. That smile on Amazon boxes is starting to look like a smirk.
tonystubblebine 9y ago
I'm reading some comments here that are disappointed, but I'm impressed. O'Reilly navigated itself through two major contractions in tech book publishing. Practically every other company would have packed it in or found some really horrendous way to screw customers. The first contraction was the dot.com crash. During the boom, O'Reilly was so flush with cash that they did things like put Larry Wall (creator of Perl) on payroll, just because. And right before the crash they built two new office buildings and a warehouse. So they were screwed when business went away and somehow they wiggled their way out of that. I joined the company right after the crash and stayed for 2.5 years. Every employee meeting included an update on our negotiations with the banks--literally the CFO was begging banks to be able to stay in business. She's now CEO of the company. I get a constant reminder of how lean things were then when I check my 401k account from that time. There was one all hands meeting where O'Reilly announced they were going to match contributions. The execs were so happy--I think they thought it was a signal that the tide had turned after waves of layoffs. (Even though I'm pretty sure the money came from a one-time windfall from being investors in Blogger) The thing though about that matching contribution is that it wasn't much. It definitely wasn't one to one. I can't remember the exact rules for how much they were going to match. But my current 401k statement breaks out my contributions vs. O'Reilly's. After twelve years of compounding interest, that employer contribution is now worth $128.24. (In other words, things were so bad that they were celebrating contributing about $40 to my retirement). And then, there was the second contraction. Up until about 2005, every single programmer had a library of O'Reilly books on their desk. That time is gone. I haven't seen a programmer who worked that way at any company recently (I'm sure there are some). Most companies would have just packed it in. Tim O'Reilly had a good run and cares about other things, like politics. Dale Dougherty could do anything and has by starting Make Magazine and Makerfaire. But there are hundreds of people at O'Reilly and they kept plugging away and finding ways to be relevant. Those ways just aren't books anymore--at least not like they used to be. The company found other ways than books to make a difference. The O'Reilly conferences are cutting edge because O'Reilly still picks cutting edge people as conference chairs. And OATV, in venture capital, is another great example, which continues to experiment with things like Indie.vc. So, to take it full circle. I'm impressed that O'Reilly is still in business at all, and more so that they are relevant at all. And when I look at their print business, I think, well, they're doing the best they can with a format that has declining importance. I think about the context above when I hear about things like removing some book features or letting print quality slip. Those seem like reasonable adjustments that are much better than the alternatives which I think were probably go out of business or sell to Pearson.
ernsheong 9y ago
O'Reilly, your SafariBooksOnline pricing for folks outside the US is insane. Great content, but the pricing is too much for someone who isn't earning US dollars. Well, I guess it's just a matter of time someone came up with something more democratized, and cheaper.
justanton 9y ago
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 are just stream of text, without a proper layout. I truly wonder, if Safari employees have read a whole book on their platform themselves. If I needed to read a whole book — I would still buy the paper version directly from the publisher or Amazon. The news, that O'Reilly is gradually switching towards a subscription-only model in the future, are very disturbing for me.
- gglitch 9y ago
  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.
  - justanton 9y ago
    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?
    - gglitch 9y ago
      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.
teilo 9y ago
Horrible news. In my experience tech books tend to be horribly formatted in ePUB and MOBI format. They don't have to be, but they usually are. When I have bought from O'Reilly in the past, I have always defaulted to PDF. Now, not only does that option go away, everything will be DRM going forward.
TY 9y ago
Very disappointed by this decision. I have been a customer of OReilly for about 20 years, buying ebooks since 2009. I really liked DRM free nature of their ebooks, so that I could read them on all of my devices. Maybe decision makes sense from economic perspective. But they really have to consider who their audience is. These are the people who still complain that Google Reader was killed and loss of good will and PR consequences of this decision will come to haunt them for years, regardless of the current financial reality.
AndyHunt 9y ago
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
- starsinspace 9y ago
  Question: do you consider giving up on the soft-DRM (watermarking of PDFs) too? Lack of DRM (both soft and hard) was for me the biggest feature when buying from O'Reilly. It's what made it quite unique and why I bought most of my tech-related eBooks there. I had a somewhat unpleasant surprise when I bought books directly from your website and found them to be watermarked. Didn't see that written anywhere on the site before I purchased...
  - rollover 9y ago
    The watermarking is the sole reason I don't buy ebooks from PragProg.
clavalle 9y ago
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.
stephanakib 9y ago
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
- starsinspace 9y ago
  Are the PDF eBooks watermarked?
  - stephanakib 9y ago
    Yes they are watermarked for security
    - rollover 9y ago
      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.
      - stephanakib 9y ago
        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.
        rollover 9y ago
        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.
ffernand 9y ago
Tim O'Reilly mentioned on twitter that he's not opposed to selling PDF's via a third party bookstore. https://twitter.com/timoreilly/status/880472045137670144 https://twitter.com/timoreilly/status/880472045137670144 I can only hope that a statement like this isn't used to pacify the masses until this issue is relegated to obscurity. In the mean time, I'm looking at other publishers (thank GOD that many of them I heaven't heard of are discussed here) for content and refuse to pay for a $400/yr safari subscription while NEVER REALLY OWNING ANYTHING.
bricss 9y ago
Good luck O'Reilly!
sarawinge 9y ago
Here's more about why O'Reilly stopped selling books on the site: http://oreil.ly/2t9RnXP http://oreil.ly/2t9RnXP (disclaimer: I work there!)
JBNixx 9y ago
This is disappointing, but I guess it the way most companies are going. Subscriptions are fine, but they quickly add up. I'm in the process of cutting out stuff I don't use. As it's quick to forget you have been paying for service "X" and haven't actually been using it to get your moneys worth. Safari would quickly fall into that category for me. However there are plenty of online stores which sell DRM free books, so no big deal really.

233 points by stock_toaster 9y ago

Having purchased many books thru O'Reilly, and now using Safari Online - I'm a huge fan of this move. Feels to me like going from iTunes to Spotify, or Netflix DVDs to Streaming.

hdra 9y ago
I'm not. I purchased many books from O'Reilly as well, but the number is more like 4-5 books a year. Even with just 4-5 books a year I still usually end up with a book left unread or unfinished every time. Spotify/Netflix makes perfect sense for a subscription model because of the way we consume musics/videos. The same can't be said for technical books. Not for $399 a year anyway. With that price point, seems like they are hoping to get employers to pay for it.
- tebruno99 9y ago
  They are also gambling that they are worth it and that you can't live without them vrs the competition. Which now with DRM only option, the competition just moved into first place.
- throwaway7645 9y ago
  Bingo...i was thinking the same thing.
  - ianai 9y ago
    Either employers or they're hoping people will just "suck it up". For this to really work, they need to drop the price to Netflix/Spotify levels of 10/month.
- ddrum001 9y ago
  I guess I'm an anomaly in that I read far more books than watching movies, but I agree that most consumers will want a variety of music and shows, unlike books. However, isn't the price point ($35/month), which is 4x more than Spotify, roughly in line with the price for a single book, which is roughly 4x an album. I guess the main difference is not that the price ratio between subscription and individual items is off, but rather that most consumers don't want 1 book a month. It's a bummer that they don't give people an option, but I'm still a fan of Safari...and I hope this move will mean they drastically improve the Safari app, much like Netflix has doubled down on Streaming now that they don't do DVDs.
  - hdra 9y ago
    I read books far more than I do watching movies or tv shows as well, but I don't include technical books in my count. I read general books for entertainment, and maybe learn one or two mundane things that I don't know before. I read maybe 2-3, sometimes 4 books a month for entertainment. When I read technical books, its going to be because there is a specific thing that I want to learn, and when I'm done with the books, I expect to have a new skill under my belt that I can start polishing. I certainly don't do this at a rate of 1 book a month. Yeah, the fact the pricing is offered at rate that is way more than most people's (including mine) purchasing habit is a bummer, but the inclusion of DRM meaning that you lose access to your "purchase" once your subscription ends is the deal breaker for me. The fact there is a lot more content in the Safari offering may look like a good value in the marketing copy, but that just means more noise to filter through for me. I only have limited amount of time to spend on consuming content after all.

manaskarekar 9y ago

This really sucks. It was my favorite place to buy books. It seemed like the one place that had the model closest to being right. - They used to have an ongoing discount of 45% and more on special holidays. - They were DRM free in multiple formats and they gave you discounts on ebooks if you had purchased the print books. - They had regular updates to ebooks posted in one single list that you could keep up with. I wish I had purchased all the books on my wish-list before this was announced. The Safari subscription model makes no sense to my use-case. I guess that makes Informit.com and No Starch Press my goto book stores. Also Manning and Apress, but their selection is weaker.

throwaway7645 9y ago
I like NoStarchPress, but Manning has waaaay more books.
- billpollock 9y ago
  Good books take time. We're not in a rush to make lots of them.
  - manaskarekar 9y ago
    Thank you for nostarchpress. Also thank you for the humble bundle, please keep them coming!
  - throwaway7645 9y ago
    I agree. I own fantastic books from both NoStarch and Manning and a few from O'Reilly to name a few publishers (I really like tech books). I check NoStarch about once a month to see if there is something new on the horizon and unfortunately there's usually not a huge amount. Manning's MEAP program usually has 25+ books in the works and there are at least 5 I'm waiting on. Tldr; I wish NoStarch published more of their great books.
- gregjwild 9y ago
  And many more to come! We're always on the hunt for new tech to teach in our books (and now videos) No Starch are great too though. I own a few myself :)

dcw303 9y ago

I just posted this on another thread: I just got this via email and I'm very disappointed too. DRM issues aside, Kindle is still terrible for tech books. Code samples, data tables, etc. They all look crummy. The pdf ebooks from the Oreilly store had far superior formatting.

kin 9y ago
Google Play store offers O'Reilly books DRM free in both PDF and ePub format.
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  Its amazing that a company whose main product is search has such a worthless search for their store. Its absolutely worthless unless you already know exactly what you want. You have to use their general search product to find enough info to bring up the exact title you want to buy. For example you can't on the play store find all the oreilly books that aren't drm encumbered or find all the books on a certain topic in a certain range of years directly via its interface.
  - padthai 9y ago
    Not only the store, Youtube and Scholar do not provide a good search experience either. I wonder why. In fact I remember that when Youtube got adquired by Google search got worse.
- voltagex_ 9y ago
  How? I just bought "You don't know JS: Up and Going" (only $5, so not bad as a test) and I was prompted to download Google Books. I have stopped buying Kindle books due to no longer being able to back up the files (KFX switched to a new encryption type). I rarely buy technical books, but O'Reilly was my go-to due to actually being able to have the real files offline. Edit: Okay, Google don't make it easy and there's no way to do it from Android. Go to https://books.google.com.au/books https://books.google.com.au/books and click on a book in your library. If the publisher has allowed it, there'll be a cog in the upper right corner that will have "Download PDF" and "Download EPUB" available.

hdra 9y ago

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.

alexott 9y ago
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

clumsysmurf 9y ago

This is devastating ... I don't have the income to justify $399/yr for Safari subscription. "the growth of membership on Safari far exceeds the individual units previously purchased on oreilly.com" ... that doesn't explain why the two options couldn't co-exist. "In addition to giving our customers the choice and convenience they expect" ... no, they just took away the choice and convenience I expect. Over time, I've favored different formats based on what devices I have owned, and bugs in the apps themselves (OS X 10.11 Preview had terrible PDF rendering for non-retina devices). So there goes my choice on what I want to buy when, and what format to use where. I hope this doesn't encourage InformIT, Manning, PragProg or RockyNook to go down these roads. Until then, I guess they will get my money.

throwaway2016a 9y ago
They aren't stopping all retail. Just direct to consumer sales. Amazon and brick and mortar stores will still sell O'Reilly books. Edit: I am uncertain of the eBook / PDF offering at other retailers.
- detaro 9y ago
  Amazon selling PDFs? Brick and mortar selling PDFs?
  - kin 9y ago
    Amazon sells Kindle versions so there's DRM. But, Google Play store offers PDF and ePub versions of O'Reilly books.
    - detaro 9y ago
      > Google Play store offers PDF and ePub versions of O'Reilly books. Oh, interesting, I wasn't aware of that. Thanks!
      - nmusatti 9y ago

walterbell 9y ago

Are O'Reilly PDFs available through retailers? Through Safari?

pan69 9y ago
I can't tell for sure but it seems to be on the bandwagon of; pay for what you don't use and what you pay for you don't actually own.

dawnerd 9y ago

Lots of outrage but the important thing here is they'll still be available from other retailers. They're not forcing you to buy a subscription to get the books.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
The problem is other retailers don't offer the DRM-free ebooks that O'Reilly was. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. all DRM them to heck. Going forward, the only time I'm gonna be buying O'Reilly ebooks is when they're on Humble Bundle.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Oletros 9y ago
1. Books were DRM free and in various formats. I could use the PDF in my computer and the epub in my ebook reader or tablet. 2. There were discounts when registering the purchased printed book 3. There were discounts for newer editions of a book

troydj 9y ago

One of the things I'll miss is the "upgrade a registered O'Reilly print book to an ebook for $4.99" option. Always nice to have both the print and [affordable] ebook versions. Bummer.

myth_drannon 9y ago
Manning gives that you for free
- douche 9y ago
  That and their daily half-off sales have resulted in me spending far too much money on their books... At least they generally have good editing and a pretty high quality bar, better than I've seen with Packt or Apress.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - gregjwild 9y ago
    Glad to hear you've enjoyed our stuff. We really do try to do a good job with it! :)
- gregjwild 9y ago
  We also allow eBook customers to upgrade to a print book for $12 plus shipping - https://www.manning.com/ebooks https://www.manning.com/ebooks

michaelmrose 9y ago

In case it might help anyone many libraries pay for a subscription to safari books. For example the Seattle library system provides free access to safari books to all card holders. Seattle library cards are available not only to anyone in who works, lives or owns property in seattle/king county but also those who have a card in one of several surrounding county library systems. Further non-resident cards may be had for $85 a year. Unlike having a personal account you cannot download items for offline viewing, can't access video training, and can't access books in progress. Still this provides access to the bulk of the material you may want to read.

ianai 9y ago
Can you essentially only read the books from the library website?
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  Years ago I wrote up a quick script using imacros and calibre to create epubs based on the documents available from safari. I would consider this fair use format shifting. Legal opinions probably vary but this was essentially indistinguishable from just reading the book so long as the script didn't grab a page per second and pretty easy to do.
asdefghyk 9y ago
RE "....many libraries pay for a subscription to safari books....." It is only a subset of the Oreilly ebooks. NOt all of them ....

torstenvl 9y ago

Deeply disappointing. O'Reilly had some really good things going for it, and it just decided to flush it down the drain. This is on par with Apple moving to butterfly switch keyboards across its entire laptop line, or Netscape deciding to ditch its browser and rewrite it from scratch. Tragic, user-hostile blunders. And it wouldn't completely surprise me if this marked the beginning of the end for O'Reilly.

SomeHacker44 9y ago
(It's the "touch bar" that made this my last Apple laptop until they get rid of it, but true, the keyboard is pretty darn bad too.)
- heartbreak 9y ago
  Isn't that an optional feature?
  - kalleboo 9y ago
    Only on the 13-inch, and even there the non-TouchBar version has some lame limitations (e.g. only 2 USB-C ports and slower WiFi)
  - yellow_postit 9y ago
    Sadly no, it's forced on every pro model except the lowest spec one.
avuton 9y ago
You remember a different Netscape than I do. Netscape was the kind of browser you hated to recommend to a loved one. The experience was truly subpar. When Firebird was announced, the user experience improved significantly over what Netscape could have ever hoped to attain, though it still took some time before recommending it to a loved one would turn out not to be a mistake.
- torstenvl 9y ago

ilamont 9y ago

One other thing worth mentioning: Publishers (and authors) were notified of the change today. It's akin to an app store suddenly announcing a major shift in the business model and payouts to app developers, effective immediately. For my company, the single-title sales are often greater than Safari subscription income, and I am not sure sending visitors to Amazon is going to make up for the lost sales on O'Reilly. I would have much preferred if O'Reilly sent customers directly to my publisher's website, for people who want to purchase PDFs or ebooks from other vendors besides Amazon. Reading utility nonfiction/technical titles are not the same as binge-watching Netflix or plugging into a Spotify playlist all day. Readers have very specific needs and learning priorities, and the all-you-can-eat model doesn't work for everyone.

TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
I actually really like Safari books online, the all-you-can-eat subscription style matches my usage perfectly. My experience has been that most technical books aren't worth reading cover to cover, but many make for great references. When researching certain technical topics, I just open dozens of books and skip straight to the relevant sections.
- clumsysmurf 9y ago
  But even if you like the subscription model, you are forced to consume the content a certain way. If I wanted to read on my Android tablet, presumably I'd use the Safari app ... which barely has a mediocre rating. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.safariflow.queue&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.safariflow...
  - TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
    Yeah, I agree with you. I dislike that aspect of the service. 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 http://exploringjs.com/es6.html

throwaway2016a 9y ago

O'Reilly author here. This is the email we got today. Sounds like they also plan to offer courses through Safari as well. ------------------------- I'm writing to let you know about some changes—including new opportunities for you—at O'Reilly. First, as of today, we are discontinuing fulfillment of individual book and video purchases on shop.oreilly.com. Books (both ebook and print) will still be available for sale via other digital and bricks-and-mortar retail channels. Plus, every book and video will still have a product page on oreilly.com, offering customers two options for getting the content they want: Safari membership (starting with a free 10-day trial) and, for books, a "buy from Amazon" button. Why the change? It's clear that we're in the midst of a fundamental shift in how people get and use content. Subscription services like Spotify and Netflix are the new norm, as people opt for paying for digital access rather than purchasing physical units one by one. We've already seen this in our own business—the growth of subscribers on Safari far exceeds the individual units previously purchased on oreilly.com. That's the reason for the change. And with Safari, O'Reilly is uniquely positioned to give our customers the choice and convenience they expect. When we launched Safari back in 2001, we knew we were investing in the future of publishing, and today, that future is here. Since 2014, when O'Reilly became sole owner of Safari, we have refocused our business around its potential as a membership platform. It's working—just this week, Outsell Insights published a report on Safari that gave us a "Strongly Positive" rating and noted that, "Safari shows that continuous reinvention through the addition of new tools onto a solid content base provides an extremely strong foundation on which to build a business. As an example, it also shows the kind of timescales necessary to build a strong reputation for quality content, one on which a more tools-focused solution is possible." That's where "new opportunities for you" come in. We've developed successful new products like Live Online Training and video Learning Paths, available exclusively on Safari, and we have more in the works. We'll be in touch soon with more information about these new ways we can work together on Safari. And of course, we will continue to publish books and videos that are available both as stand-alone products and on Safari.

wavefunction 9y ago
"including new opportunities for you" I'll be the judge of that

kin 9y ago

The $399/yr doesn't make sense for a lot of people. It definitely is too high a price point for me as I only read 1 or 2 O'Reilly books a year at most. It's nice to have a copy lying around for reference years later. On the flip side, I totally understand them going DRM-only for digital publishers. O'Reilly PDFs are way too easy to find for free with minimal Google-fu.

nathanasmith 9y ago
The DRM won't change the availability of O'Reilly books on pirate sites in the least.
kronos29296 9y ago
Only thing that will change with DRM is less Google-fu and more Pirate-fu which people with good google-fu also have in abundance.
- swiley 9y ago
  Yeah there's absolutely no way I would ever pay for something with DRM. This will end up going the way the textbooks went.
starsinspace 9y ago
> On the flip side, I totally understand them going DRM-only for digital publishers. Has the introduction of evermore draconian DRM in movie disc formats prevented them from appearing on pirate sites?
- Spivak 9y ago
  Does DRM claim to accomplish that? Sure, they appear eventually but it does slow people down and raises the technical knowledge bar required to do so.

kqr2 9y ago

Does anyone know how this will affect previous ebooks purchased via O'Reilly? Will you still be able to login and access the digital books or do you need to download all of them before a certain date?

runevault 9y ago
They say you will still be able to access stuff you already bought for life. You certainly already can access them as I logged into my account to check.

manicdee 9y ago

"Seeing as 40% of our customers buy pink things, we are reducing costs by selling only pink things." The whole point if going to O'Reilly was DRM free books that I can use on my various devices (iPad, Sony Reader). Guess it's off to Apress in the future. Can't load Kindle or Kobo books into the Sony.

stephanakib 9y ago
FWIW informit.com has the same model. We have regular holiday sales, update our eBooks, and offer the different DRM-Free formats including PDFs. Informit.com is a Pearson owned site and sells the following tech imprints: Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall, Sams, Microsoft Press, Cisco Press, Pearston IT Certification, Big Nerd Ranch, Peachpit, Adobe Press, and New Riders.

michaelmrose 9y ago

Amazon is a terrible place to buy books. Its difficult to discern which books are encumbered by drm and further even if the publisher provides the book drm free its damn difficult to get at the unencumbered ebook file. I bought such a book and spent an hour of my life and talked to 3 separate employees and the best I could do was a refund after talking to 3 apathetic employees. As far as I'm concerned there is not one thing good about the entire platform. I hate the reader, I hate their tablets, I hate their ebook store, I hate their reader app. They don't provide a damn thing that isn't inferior to other options and have no particular benefit to helping you use their wares in an open fashion. They are only interested in options which lock you to their platform. Its as if walmart was only interested in selling you dvds that work only in terrible walmart branded dvd players that require you to use walmarts subscription service instead of netflix.

SomeHacker44 9y ago
I don't mind buying pure-text books from Amazon. That basically means novels. I don't even mind the DRM so much, as I read the book once and then don't really care, and because I have almost never had problems with the fact that I have literally over a dozen Kindle devices and Kindle-app running devices. However, technical, computer, electronics, physics and math books are almost all uniformly terrible from Amazon (or even epub). These are long-term references that need a proper print layout option (PDF) and be unencumbered by DRM. A 2002 edition of Mastering Regular Expressions is virtually totally applicable today, 15 years later - but imagine if I had bought this in a DRM'd Sony version, or a Palm .prc (now part of Amazon)? I'd be SOL.

Lendal 9y ago

I'm a Safari online subscriber myself, but I think this decision is a huge mistake. I also own books that I purchased from O'Reilly and I still use those books. Just because I don't continue to re-purchase them doesn't mean I don't use them or will never purchase another. I use them on a daily basis. I also use Safari on a daily basis. Why can't they see that there is a need for both models? I rent things, and I own things. Just because I rent some things doesn't mean I want to rent everything. By the same token, just because I buy things every day doesn't mean I never want to rent anything. We are truly living in the Idiocracy.

ianai 9y ago
I just don't understand the business choice. It's not like this will push people onto the safari books program. If anything, I worry that this portends the end for them.
walterbell 9y ago
Online reading enables tracking, the data has value.
- gregjwild 9y ago
  Data has value, but not as much value as repeat customer loyalty.
  - walterbell 9y ago
    Yes, the comments in this thread provide valuable data, if the O'Reilly marketing department has the appropriate parser.

trustfundbaby 9y ago

This is disappointing. Amazon doesn't let you buy pdfs, which I prefer over epubs.

gamesbrainiac 9y ago

This does not come as a surprise. Packt now has Mapt, and subscription based services such as Pluralsight are showing far healthier profit margins than O'Reilly. This is just their attempt to get in line with what other publishers are offering.

kqr2 9y ago

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?

EwanToo 9y ago
This is surely the unspoken element of O'Reilly's change here, piracy of technical PDFs is rampant.
- subpixel 9y ago
  The thing is, by making pdfs harder to get through legit channels they are going to increase traffic through illegitimate channels. It's not about how many files are available, it's about how many people are looking for them.
  - jamespo 9y ago
    Not if they stop making PDFs full stop
    - kronos29296 9y ago
      Yeah stop book photocopying by not publishing books is the best way to do it. Then they are no longer book publishers just another website with a premium subscription.
      - chris_wot 9y ago
        People like me will just publish directly to gitbook
- throwaway2048 9y ago
  If you think this makes piracy harder in any way, you are badly mistaken. It only takes one person to "break" whatever protection there is on the content, its almost entirely irrelevant just how much protection is on that content, because only one person needs to go through the process.

peterarmstrong 9y ago

This is very disappointing. When discussing the space, I liked to point at O'Reilly, Manning and the Prags as examples of tech publishers that did a good job directly selling ebooks. I've bought many books from all three of them. (Disclosure: Manning author twice, Leanpub co-founder.) Now, at Leanpub we're going to be rolling out our own courses in the next couple months, so we agree with O'Reilly that there are lots of great ways to produce and distribute learning material. However, the book is the best, most general and timeless way. We're committed to selling DRM-free ebooks in PDF, EPUB and MOBI directly from on our own site for the long term. The ebook world should not just give up and sell everything through Amazon. I like Amazon--they do a great job of focusing on customers, I have Amazon Prime, and I'm really happy that Jeff Bezos is a good owner for the Washington Post. But we should not let Amazon become the only seller of ebooks. Stay tuned for something else we're planning in this regard in a few weeks...

bigtunacan 9y ago
I stopped using Leanpub as soon as you started charging author's an upfront fee of $99 PER BOOK to even start writing a book on your platform.

SomeHacker44 9y ago

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 with O'Reilly himself or any of the executives at O'Reilly. I sure as heck am not going to buy any technical books from O'Reilly by Amazon. The things I liked from O'Reilly, now gone, are: 1. PDF, ePub and Mobi formats, all DRM free, so I could read them in the ideal format for each device I read them on. And, I have a lot of devices: several Macs and PCs, several iPads, several Kindles (used almost exclusively for fiction as technical works are horrible in non-PDF), several phones of various kinds. I could put both the ePub and PDF into iBooks (not my favorite app, but it does sync) and read the ePub on the subway if I wanted, and the PDF on the desktop and iPad (cause, as I said, ePub is terrible for technical books). I like my fully properly typeset color, indexed PDFs! 2. 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 (which is still a purchase not a subscription), and why I dropped JetBrains when they moved to their subscription model and then re-joined them when they went to "Subscription + keep your start of subscription version forever". I don't rent stuff. I buy it and own it. Plain and simple. I'm glad that there are other publishers out there like Pragmatic Press and Apress that have been publishing good content, because you just lost a highly dedicated customer who always shopped O'Reilly first even for non-O'Reilly books. Congratulations, and shame on you.

pirocks 9y ago
Random question: What did you switch to when you dropped JetBrains, and did you notice a productivity drop?
- reitanqild 9y ago
  Former user of Eclipse an IntelliJ, now Netbeans: For some people (like me) Netbeans is awesome. I love the fact that it can use pom as its own project model and IMO it aligns better with OS keyboard shortcuts (Win and Linux at least) than VS, eclipse and IntelliJ). Be prepared for weird reactions though: it seems everyone "knows" it is awful.

troydj 9y ago

Maybe if we all start sending tweets to @timoreilly he will reconsider this very unfortunate decision...

rexreed 9y ago
From what I understand he hasn't been making day-to-day decisions for O'reilly for at least 10 years. He's just the owner and figurehead.

dyukqu 9y ago

Music and film (a.k.a. Spotify & Netflix) are entertainment means. Books are not - especially the technical ones. You can buy a Netflix and Spotify subscription and stream them 24/7 without the need for paying attention. How could they expect people to buy a subscription for $399 and be happy/ok/cool about it? You cannot "stream" books. I'd feel I have done a dead investment. I doubt it will be a successful strategy even for half of the current subscription cost.

tebruno99 9y ago

I've cancelled my Safari subscription and moving everything over to Apress. This is definitely a very sad day. I own every O'Reilly book ever published DRM Free and still had Safari, but never again. Apress, Informit, and Packtpub you are now #1, BE #1, stay customer first.

vk3000 9y ago

For those of us deeply disappointed at O'reilly discontinuation of PDF ebooks, I've started an "idea" on O'reilly's support website to bring them back: http://support.oreilly.com/oreilly/topics/bring-back-pdf-ebooks http://support.oreilly.com/oreilly/topics/bring-back-pdf-ebo... Hopefully, if it gets enough upvotes, they'll consider it.

flor1s 9y ago

I don't know how the math works, but ACM members currently get free access to Safari. You can sign up for ACM for $99 a year.

guu 9y ago
Isn't this a subset of the full safari library?
- flor1s 9y ago
  It used to be, but currently it seems to be the complete catalog.

newscracker 9y ago

I'm terribly disappointed, and that's putting it mildly. I have bought many eBooks from O'Reilly and have also provided feedback repeatedly that the main reasons I buy from O'Reilly are DRM free books in different formats (especially PDF and ePub, which I use). It's the same set of reasons I buy books from Apress, Pragprog, NoStarch, Packtpub and Manning (to name a few others). I have tried Safari Online through an employer subscription, but I just cannot get used to reading long books on a browser and hence don't use it (don't even talk about apps on other platforms). I need my books in specific formats that I can use in book reading apps across different platforms. I don't like being connected all the time just to read a book. For me reading books is mostly an offline-like activity (except if I have to search about something online). Books are also very different from other kinds of media that are more of an ephemeral nature, like music, movies, TV shows, etc. Though many technical books might become outdated quickly, there are many books that do contain almost timeless pieces of information and wisdom. I don't buy books on Amazon. I don't buy books in Apple's iBooks store. There is no way to know upfront if something has DRM or not. I don't like supporting DRMd content for books. O'Reilly, if you're reading this, your decision to stop selling eBooks like you used to is a very poor one for your readers. You may end up making more money from unused Safari subscriptions, but you won't have the fan following you had before. As for comparisons with Pluralsight, I despise such models that are filled with DRM and restrictions. To Apress, Pragprog, NoStarch, Packtpub, Manning and others - please do not change your models and remove DRM free eBooks in multiple formats from your stores. I, for one, will stop buying whenever something like that happens. Subscription models are very poor in user experience and don't provide adequate freedom to read whenever/wherever.

billpollock 9y ago
No worries. We're not changing the way we do business at no starch. Just working to do better.
gregjwild 9y ago
We (Manning) have no intention of ceasing DRM free book distribution. If anything, we're in the process of diversifying ways you can consume our content :)

chx 9y ago

I contacted customer support and they had this to say: > We currently have the Kindle versions of our title available on Amazon.com and the ePub version at Google Play or IBooks for your mobile devices. We do not currently have the DRM free PDF versions available from any online re-sellers.

BurritoAlPastor 9y ago

Here's something interesting to know - O'Reilly's online store wasn't an in-house operation. They contracted with an ecommerce company called MarketLive, and then all the ebook stuff was an extensive (and, as far as I know, tightly-coupled) customization. But all the add-to-basket and order-processing and order-confirmation-emails stuff was through MarketLive. This is significant because early last year MarketLive was purchased by private equity, merged with some other ecommerce companies, and relocated to Texas. So it's quite possible - and here I have no particular knowledge - that the MarketLive platform is being deprecated or entirely abandoned, and this was a more attractive option for O'Reilly than trying to rebuild all that stuff on a different platform.

toyg 9y ago
O'Reilly have always been pretty transparent with their readers; I'm sure if they'd come clean on this people would have given them the benefit of the doubt. "Sorry, in a few months we are scaling down the website because our supplier is borked, bear with us." Man, I'm sure someone would have helped them for free / cheap. Trying to cover a supplier issue with bullcrap about "market trends" is not great; doing it from one day to the next is just terrible for customer relationships.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Why can't both things be true? It could very well be the case that they would have been happy to carry on with the market if it still all worked, but they didn't feel like they could justify the trouble of migrating it to a new platform.

foobardeveloper 9y ago

Is there any alternative to Safari Books Online which has both beginner and advanced content, video and books ? (If yes, I want to move away from Safari on grounds of principle)

stephanakib 9y ago
Informit.com is a Pearson owned site and we sell the following tech imprints for all levels: Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall, Sams, Microsoft Press, Cisco Press, Pearston IT Certification, Que, Big Nerd Ranch, Peachpit, Adobe Press, and New Riders. We have regular holiday sales (including a 4th of July sale starting tomorrow), update our eBooks, and offer the different DRM-Free formats including PDF, MOBI and EPUB.
- sjcole 9y ago
  The same is true of eBooks.com.

micheljansen 9y ago

Sad news. O'Reilly were one of the few publishers that used my preferred model: buy the paper book and add the eBook version for $10 extra or so. Best of both worlds.

Oletros 9y ago

So, no more DRM free ebooks, no more multiple format ebooks and Safari subscription cannot be used offline and cannot be used out of their apps. 349 euro is a very steep price Difficult to buy more O'Reilly books From the blog post: > That’s clear even among the largest, most stable corporations: a few years ago, a study predicted that 40% of today’s Fortune 500 companies won’t exist in a decade. Perhaps this move is the first step to be one of the 50% disappearing

sjcole 9y ago

Folks, www.eBooks.com is still selling O'Reilly titles without DRM. Prices might be less competitive than Amazon, but we're not Amazon. http://www.ebooks.com/subjects/computers/ http://www.ebooks.com/subjects/computers/

ivanr 9y ago
Interesting. How much do you charge per book sold (e.g., as a percentage of the list price)? Also, do you collect consumer taxes for the EU (and other countries that require them)?
martinkl 9y ago
I just looked up my own O'Reilly book on ebooks.com. http://www.ebooks.com/95729334/designing-data-intensive-applications/kleppmann-martin/ http://www.ebooks.com/95729334/designing-data-intensive-appl... I can't see anything about DRM on the page, but under "supported devices" it says "e-readers with Adobe Digital Editions installed". Isn't that DRM enforcement software? Could you clarify please? Edit: this page explicitly says that readers need to be compatible with Adobe DRM https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/214119286-Guide-to-ebook-reader-devices https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/214119286-Guide...
- andre_m 9y ago
  I am not sure if your book is DRM protected – if you browse the books at ebooks.com, you will see that ebooks.com is selling books in "EPUB/PDF format" and „secure EPUB/secure PDF format“. Furthermore please take a look at https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/205639205-Installing-Adobe-Digital-Editions-ADE-on-your-computer https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/205639205-Insta...: Most of the ebooks available to download from eBooks.com (but not all) are protected by Adobe DRM…

fsloth 9y ago

Does anyone know why they're killing PDF? Seems insanity to me, it's the only digital format I find suitable for consuming technical books.

rahimnathwani 9y ago

This sucks. I've been a subscriber to Safari Books Online for a couple of years. Whilst I like being able to reflow text, and in general the reading experience is good, some books just looked screwed up when reading them in the Queue app or the Safari web site. For example, some of the equations in 'Hands-on Machine Learning with Tensorflow' aren't rendered to images properly. They probably look fine in the print and PDF versions of the book, but I don't get those as a Safari subscriber. I get an HTML version with equations rendered to images, without anyone checking the quality. Amazon does sell 'print replica' editions of some books, which are as good as PDFs if you are OK reading within the Kindle app, but IIRC that's not the case for O'Reilly books, which are only available as HTML-ish versions.

vixen99 9y ago

This is dreadful and such a disappointment from a company I'd praised to others for their service.

timwaagh 9y ago

well i mostly bought their titles from bookstores in deadtree format so it does not really affect me. as long as they continue to publish good stuff and the bookstores have their books (which has become more of a problem lately) i will probably buy a few once in a while. still this is a most unwelcome deterioration. it just puts them in the category of companies that like to squeeze every dollar out of their users, which is not good because they used to enjoy a very good reputation which justified their high pricetag.

chippy 9y ago

It's clear O'Reilly is struggling. I personally know some authors, and they have made some great books, but I've not bought much from them for around 10 years. They seem to have dropped from my radar. I no longer hear from my friends that they are publishing their books with O'Reilly. Also, O'Reilly produced and ran a number of excellent quality conferences (ETech anyone?) These disappeared a long time ago. I also remember them sponsoring a whole range of meetups and smaller conferences with books given out for free being quite common. O'Reilly has changed, and they need to change too. Perhaps the internet and search engines have overtaken technical books in general? Perhaps in seeing their market share decrease over the years they need to make drastic changes to adapt?

bearsnowstorm 9y ago

I'm sure I'm not their biggest customer, but I have bought in the hundreds of dollars worth of books each year from O'Reilly for the last few, consumed as DRM free PDFs. Definitely going to re-evaluate that. When I want to buy a book on a topic I used to Google "O'Reilly <insert topic here>" as my first port of call. That just ended. I'll look to other publishers first instead, and cease recommending O'Reilly.

dcminter 9y ago
Why would their Safari service not be suitable for you if you prefer to consume their content as PDFs anyway?
- dcminter 9y ago
  Oh, looking at their site, I now see that it's a substantially different cost and set of constraints than those that applied when I allowed my subscription to lapse. Disregard.

ekidd 9y ago

I've bought well over a hundred O'Reilly books over the years, and after 2002 or so, I bought almost all of them as DRM-free PDFs. But in recent years, I've only averaged an O'Reilly book or two per year, because they've been slow to publish books on new technologies I cared about. I find that, with few exceptions, Kindle programming ebooks are annoying and unpleasant. Some of the "textbook"-mode ones (where you can highlight diagrams and not just text) are tolerable on a Chromebook in tablet mode, but just barely. And there's no way I'm going to pay $399/year for Safari, not when I'm currently spending $0-50/year, and certainly not for the privilege of using what people tell me is a mediocre mobile app. So going forward, this means that I'll buy maybe one O'Reilly book every other year through Amazon. Does this also mean that O'Reilly is no longer going to be offering "early release" books for people who don't buy Safari? I think that something like 90% of my technical book purchases in the last 10 years were early release.

delhanty 9y ago

Giving the authors zero prior notice - that's rude! As a long-term buyer of lots of O'Reilly ebooks - it's disappointing, but it's their prerogative if they want to exit the market. It's not like we entered into some lifetime contract where they agreed to sell me ebooks forever. From O'Reilly 's point of view, this looks rational though. Joel Spolsky [1] and Jeff Attwood [2] called it in 2008: >What is stackoverflow.com? >Nothing, yet. >But here’s the concept: >Programmers seem to have stopped reading books. The market for books on programming topics is miniscule compared to the number of working programmers. Then they made doubly sure by making SO a huge success! In music publishing, most of the money in the mainstream has moved from music sales to live performances, with streaming subscriptions bring up the rear. Isn't the same thing likely happening here with O'Reilly's conference business probably dwarfing everything else? [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/04/16/stackoverflowcom/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/04/16/stackoverflowcom/ [2] https://blog.codinghorror.com/programmers-dont-read-books-but-you-should/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/programmers-dont-read-books-bu...

bryanrasmussen 9y ago
frankly I've found the utility of my oreilly membership has definitely increased over the last few years as the utility of Stackoverflow and Google searching on an issue has declined. However it's true that I don't buy physical books very much anymore, and definitely not physical technical books.

chrsw 9y ago

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'Reilly didn't have this problem. They've even taken away that option now. Looking back, this had to be expected. The writing was on the wall when they switched from a lay-flat binding for most or their titles to the cheaper, much hard to read while coding, perfect binding.

ivanr 9y ago
Yes, they're print-on-demand books, printed by Lightning Source (the last time I checked). They're not cheap to print, at least not at the list price; I don't know what deal O'Reilly might have. However, they're vastly more convenient because Lightning Source will ship them directly to retailers so publishers don't need warehouses. If I'd have to guess, I'd say that O'Reilly might be printing a small initial batch for each book, switching to exclusively POD once the run has depleted. Source: I also use Lightning Source for my tiny publishing operation. Yes, the quality is not the same as the traditionally printed books, although personally I don't think they're that bad (those I've seen, anyway). In my case, as a small publisher, I would never be able to afford to operate warehouses profitably, because we only have a couple of books. We actually tried, but it was too expensive and time consuming at low volumes. We also stopped selling paperbacks, because it's very difficult to complete on the shipping costs with the likes of Amazon.
- currysausage 9y ago
  My "JavaScript Definitive Guide" ordered from Amazon.de (and printed by Lightning Source UK, if I recall correctly) was of shocking quality too. I returned it and got a more expensive copy from my local bookstore, printed by Lightning Source International. Very sharp type.
  - ivanr 9y ago

jefe_ 9y ago

Have had Safari Books Online for about a year now, got it 50% off last August, love it. There have been several books I started reading in SBO and then ordered physical copies on Amazon. Never even occurred to me to order the books from Safari directly. The books I order are about broad topics and themes (Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Enterprise IoT, etc.). Rarely would I order a book about a specific Language or Framework, they have a limited shelf-life, but I'll absolutely reference the online versions to grab the info I need (more valuable format, can have open on monitor, search, etc.). Their process for alerting authors of this change may not have been great, but it seems like a smart business decision (assuming my use case if fairly typical).

leopld 9y ago

Completely threw me off when I got the email. Safari Books Online is really expensive, and I dislike seeing private entrepreneurs reinventing public libraries (and even selling it as an innovative concept).

Finnucane 9y ago

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 inventory becomes more burdensome to them. So they said, screw it, we'll join the Borg and be assimilated. (Personally, I get access to the Safari online service through the library at work, so I don't have to worry about it too much).

Oletros 9y ago
> 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

tomku 9y ago

I used to buy a lot of O'Reilly ebooks, always DRM-free directly from them. I thought they had a great business model and they published quite a few excellent books. They've slowly lost me as a customer over the past few years as those two characteristics have disappeared. Other publishers have more consistent quality, better coverage of new tech and better pricing. This just adds "access to DRM-free downloadable files" to the list of things that other publishers do better. It'll be interesting to see how having all of their digital content locked behind Safari will affect their ability to attract authors. Maybe it'll work out well for them overall, who knows.

a3n 9y ago

I watched premier computer bookshops die -- SoftPro's disappearance in the south Denver area was so sad for me. This was a somewhat long process; there was a period where we were wringing our hands about the physical computer book stores disappearing. But there was O'Reilly, other smaller but equally good online vendors, and also rans. I think now we're seeing the start of the same decline and disappearance of online outlets. That smile on Amazon boxes is starting to look like a smirk.

tonystubblebine 9y ago

I'm reading some comments here that are disappointed, but I'm impressed. O'Reilly navigated itself through two major contractions in tech book publishing. Practically every other company would have packed it in or found some really horrendous way to screw customers. The first contraction was the dot.com crash. During the boom, O'Reilly was so flush with cash that they did things like put Larry Wall (creator of Perl) on payroll, just because. And right before the crash they built two new office buildings and a warehouse. So they were screwed when business went away and somehow they wiggled their way out of that. I joined the company right after the crash and stayed for 2.5 years. Every employee meeting included an update on our negotiations with the banks--literally the CFO was begging banks to be able to stay in business. She's now CEO of the company. I get a constant reminder of how lean things were then when I check my 401k account from that time. There was one all hands meeting where O'Reilly announced they were going to match contributions. The execs were so happy--I think they thought it was a signal that the tide had turned after waves of layoffs. (Even though I'm pretty sure the money came from a one-time windfall from being investors in Blogger) The thing though about that matching contribution is that it wasn't much. It definitely wasn't one to one. I can't remember the exact rules for how much they were going to match. But my current 401k statement breaks out my contributions vs. O'Reilly's. After twelve years of compounding interest, that employer contribution is now worth $128.24. (In other words, things were so bad that they were celebrating contributing about $40 to my retirement). And then, there was the second contraction. Up until about 2005, every single programmer had a library of O'Reilly books on their desk. That time is gone. I haven't seen a programmer who worked that way at any company recently (I'm sure there are some). Most companies would have just packed it in. Tim O'Reilly had a good run and cares about other things, like politics. Dale Dougherty could do anything and has by starting Make Magazine and Makerfaire. But there are hundreds of people at O'Reilly and they kept plugging away and finding ways to be relevant. Those ways just aren't books anymore--at least not like they used to be. The company found other ways than books to make a difference. The O'Reilly conferences are cutting edge because O'Reilly still picks cutting edge people as conference chairs. And OATV, in venture capital, is another great example, which continues to experiment with things like Indie.vc. So, to take it full circle. I'm impressed that O'Reilly is still in business at all, and more so that they are relevant at all. And when I look at their print business, I think, well, they're doing the best they can with a format that has declining importance. I think about the context above when I hear about things like removing some book features or letting print quality slip. Those seem like reasonable adjustments that are much better than the alternatives which I think were probably go out of business or sell to Pearson.

ernsheong 9y ago

O'Reilly, your SafariBooksOnline pricing for folks outside the US is insane. Great content, but the pricing is too much for someone who isn't earning US dollars. Well, I guess it's just a matter of time someone came up with something more democratized, and cheaper.

justanton 9y ago

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 are just stream of text, without a proper layout. I truly wonder, if Safari employees have read a whole book on their platform themselves. If I needed to read a whole book — I would still buy the paper version directly from the publisher or Amazon. The news, that O'Reilly is gradually switching towards a subscription-only model in the future, are very disturbing for me.

gglitch 9y ago
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.
- justanton 9y ago
  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?
  - gglitch 9y ago
    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.

teilo 9y ago

Horrible news. In my experience tech books tend to be horribly formatted in ePUB and MOBI format. They don't have to be, but they usually are. When I have bought from O'Reilly in the past, I have always defaulted to PDF. Now, not only does that option go away, everything will be DRM going forward.

TY 9y ago

Very disappointed by this decision. I have been a customer of OReilly for about 20 years, buying ebooks since 2009. I really liked DRM free nature of their ebooks, so that I could read them on all of my devices. Maybe decision makes sense from economic perspective. But they really have to consider who their audience is. These are the people who still complain that Google Reader was killed and loss of good will and PR consequences of this decision will come to haunt them for years, regardless of the current financial reality.

AndyHunt 9y ago

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

starsinspace 9y ago
Question: do you consider giving up on the soft-DRM (watermarking of PDFs) too? Lack of DRM (both soft and hard) was for me the biggest feature when buying from O'Reilly. It's what made it quite unique and why I bought most of my tech-related eBooks there. I had a somewhat unpleasant surprise when I bought books directly from your website and found them to be watermarked. Didn't see that written anywhere on the site before I purchased...
- rollover 9y ago
  The watermarking is the sole reason I don't buy ebooks from PragProg.

clavalle 9y ago

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.

stephanakib 9y ago

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

starsinspace 9y ago
Are the PDF eBooks watermarked?
- stephanakib 9y ago
  Yes they are watermarked for security
  - rollover 9y ago
    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.
    - stephanakib 9y ago
      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.
      - rollover 9y ago
        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.

ffernand 9y ago

Tim O'Reilly mentioned on twitter that he's not opposed to selling PDF's via a third party bookstore. https://twitter.com/timoreilly/status/880472045137670144 https://twitter.com/timoreilly/status/880472045137670144 I can only hope that a statement like this isn't used to pacify the masses until this issue is relegated to obscurity. In the mean time, I'm looking at other publishers (thank GOD that many of them I heaven't heard of are discussed here) for content and refuse to pay for a $400/yr safari subscription while NEVER REALLY OWNING ANYTHING.

bricss 9y ago

Good luck O'Reilly!

sarawinge 9y ago

Here's more about why O'Reilly stopped selling books on the site: http://oreil.ly/2t9RnXP http://oreil.ly/2t9RnXP (disclaimer: I work there!)

JBNixx 9y ago

This is disappointing, but I guess it the way most companies are going. Subscriptions are fine, but they quickly add up. I'm in the process of cutting out stuff I don't use. As it's quick to forget you have been paying for service "X" and haven't actually been using it to get your moneys worth. Safari would quickly fall into that category for me. However there are plenty of online stores which sell DRM free books, so no big deal really.