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O'Reilly's Decision and Its DRM Implication

185 points by SeanBoocock 9y ago

banku_brougham 9y ago
When I discovered books at OReilly I thought I had stumbled into heaven. I bought a couple hundred books over several years. I thought they "get it." No longer. Companies are starting to get serious about product and service lock-in, for me and many others the paradigm is repellent.
daeken 9y ago
The conclusion here (to paraphrase: "no DRM isn't a big enough draw") doesn't seem to be at all supported. It may be that they want to focus on publishing; it may be that they simply had to charge too much; it may be that it wasn't bringing in enough sales to make it worthwhile, compared to other retail channels. Without more data (or really... any), this conclusion is pure speculation.
- llasram 9y ago
  I think the broad market trends are pretty suggestive -- consumers in general don't care about DRM or wouldn't see e.g. Amazon's success in the ebook business. For more specifics I think we'd need hyper-detailed data. For example, how many people consider Google's use of the broken ACS4 DRM "close enough" to DRM-free?
- ahkurtz 9y ago
  Yeah, I completely agree, but the OP is speculation too, because it's from Scott Myers's reading of a blog post. If you go read his linked blog post (from Laura Baldwin, President of O'Reilly media) you can see they explain many different aspects of their decision. Not once do they mention DRM in a negative way (only apologizing for no longer offering it in multiple formats via their store). In fact, they mention explicitly that Google will still publish their content DRM free. The reasons they give for discontinuing their e-commerce efforts are that book sales have been dwindling since 2000, and that they simply make too much money on new interactive media and don't want to pay for their own e-commerce infrastructure and staff anymore. I would imagine the publishers they are now relying on can also help them market their titles (which I suggest speculatively would help significantly). The article I want to link from Laura Baldwin is unfortunately only directly linkable via social media, but for now it's the only article at this link: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oreilly-mission-spreading-knowledge-innovators-laura-baldwin https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oreilly-mission-spreading-kno... Anectdotally, I bought a lot of DRM free books from O'Reilly directly. While I did share them due to convenience (coworker doesn't understand SSL! No problem), I also shared them with friends who couldn't afford them. I think this was actually good for O'Reilly, and that Tim was right and still is on this score. I say this because I personally spent many thousands of dollars through their web store. My friends without cash who went on to become computer professionals started paying for the new books they wanted as well. The vast majority of people I shared books with who could afford them would go out and buy several more after seeing the quality and value of particular titles. It's obviously a culture and economic mechanism that subsidizes certain kinds of customers and use, but I believe it subsidized the "right things". Because much of the content builds value in real marketable skills, free-riders can eventually become wealthy enough that the price to convenience ratio tips correctly and they become paying customers. It helps that they now have very strong brand loyalty. This is how I became an O'Reilly customer in the first place, so many year ago. O'Reilly direct e-book sales was a positive example of business that creates huge uncaptured value for the domain (technical knowledge), but by virtue of that generates more customers. This is the kind of business we actually need. In some ways I think it was their own success that killed their book business, because ultimately digital books were replaced by more compelling media formats, and those exist largely due to advances in design and technology, and their books are raw fuel for those advances. I say this many words only because I loved them so much, and am sad to see them go. I have to sadly admit it's been probably two years since I either read or bought a lot of titles from them. I haven't been reading or buying technical books at all. I don't know if this says something about my current level of specialization, perhaps my current level of laziness, my subconscious desire for new media formats, the quality of the titles they've been publishing, their business model, or perhaps the nature of the industry they serve. I'd personally like to hear more from O'Reilly about this eventually. I know they need to spin everything to look good, but I am incredibly curious if their non-book media is actually increasingly popular as they suggest. Do people just not want technical books anymore? Do people want them but increasingly pirate them and never pay? Are people willing to pay for technical knowledge in different media? Did their business model cost them their business, or is this the result of unavoidable change in the market for technical knowledge?
  - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
    Technology titles live on the usual bell curve. The less sophisticated and expert the audience, the bigger the potential sales. As you go up in expertise titles become increasingly niche - and harder to write well - but potential sales become more limited. The biggest sellers were always mass-market guides to Windows, OS X, Word, iOS, and such. The next tier down were introductory guides to core topics - HTML/CSS, js, Java, Flash, VisualBasic, and on on. The tier down from that was much more specific - e.g. sound on iOS - but only of interest to a relatively small audience. Eventually publishers hit a point where they can't find good expert authors because the money for writing a book is so poor compared to a typical developer salary, and the amount of work so high, that no one wants to do it. And even if they do they probably need a lot of help with editing and formatting. StackOverflow and other online sources have more or less wiped out the lower levels. Changes in the industry have wiped out the upper levels - hardly anyone needs an introduction to Windows now, and even an intro to HTML/CSS is much harder to sell than it used to be. That leaves the niche-y, limited, specialised levels - which aren't big enough on their own to support the old publishing model, except as a cottage industry. Aside from author advances, the production costs of a book don't depend on the technical level of the content. So this is why the industry is struggling. Meanwhile lynda.com, Udemy, and other courseware are cleaning up in the same space. So of course O'Reilly, Wiley, and the rest are going to try to make a play for that space. And IMO they will fail, because the costs of producing courseware are much higher than the costs of producing a book, the courseware business requires an even more specialised skill set, the market isn't huge anyway - and more than anything, they're late to the party.
    - billpollock 9y ago
      Some of this is true, but it's still possible to be a successful technical book publisher.
      - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
        Indeed. But it's rather harder to be a successful technical book author.
rst 9y ago
Perhaps best read after the blog post from current O'Reilly media president Laura Baldwin, which makes two important points: 1) Book sales have been consistently declining overall, in all media. It's not clear that DRM has much to do with this. 2) They'll still be selling DRM-free through at least one merchant, Google Play. (It's not clear whether this policy extends to Amazon as well, but they wouldn't be the first publisher selling DRM-free there; Tor's science fiction novels have been DRM-free through all merchants for a few years now.) Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oreilly-mission-spreading-knowledge-innovators-laura-baldwin https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oreilly-mission-spreading-kno...
- clumsysmurf 9y ago
  But there are no DRM free high quality PDFs ... if you download a PDF from Play Books its a conversion.
  - Buttons840 9y ago
    Can you given some more details? A screen shot demonstrating the low quality would be nice. Not that I don't what your saying. Hopefully OReilly wanted only to cut costs, and is still willing to make high quality preorders and DRM free media available through some other source.
    - nindalf 9y ago
      Here's a guy who shared a side-by-side comparison of Google and O' Reilly's editions of Designing Data Intensive Applications - https://mobile.twitter.com/kondrej/status/880540236303880193 https://mobile.twitter.com/kondrej/status/880540236303880193
      - jacobolus 9y ago
        That seems to be two different screenshots of different parts of the Google version. The typesetting is pretty bad.
      - 9y ago
reidacdc 9y ago
The death of the DRM-free model was a big concern to me, but a recent supplementary blog post from Laura Baldwin, linked-to in the article but not called out, seems to claim that O'Reilly books will still be available DRM-free from Google Books. It's not clear to me if this means the Google Play e-book store, or something else. Blog post here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oreilly-mission-spreading-knowledge-innovators-laura-baldwin https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oreilly-mission-spreading-kno...
- llasram 9y ago
  I'm just a consumer, but Google Play Books are in fact available for DRM-free download when so-requested by the publisher. Or least that's the reason Google gives when directly providing the book as a DRM-free download.
  - runevault 9y ago
    Check other comments, they aren't the quality PDFs previously available from the O'Reilly site, but crappy conversions from epub.
    - sqldba 9y ago
      Yeah. Also I'd rather not give Google my money. If something goes wrong I don't like my chances of getting it back. At least with O'Reilly you could talk to a human.
clumsysmurf 9y ago
Tim O'Reilly once said "Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy". I discovered and purchased almost every Rosenfeld Media book from OReilly. After O'Reilly moved to DRM-free books, their 2009 sales went up by 104% http://toc.oreilly.com/2010/01/2009-oreilly-ebook-revenue-up-104-percent.html http://toc.oreilly.com/2010/01/2009-oreilly-ebook-revenue-up... In other interviews, he seemed confident that DRM wasn't worth it https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0411/focus-tim-oreilly-media-e-book-antipiracy-steal-this.html https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0411/focus-tim-oreilly-me... Perhaps some part of the equation has changed since then. I'm looking forward a deeper analysis of the business reasons for this. I'm also interested to hear what more authors think - I wonder how many agree with Martin Kleppmann (Designing Data Intensive Applications) https://twitter.com/martinkl/status/880336943980085248 https://twitter.com/martinkl/status/880336943980085248 This independence day weekend there were a lot of sales, so I purchased: * "Programming Clojure, Third Edition" from pragprog (30% off sale) * The entire collection of "Enthusiast's Guide to ..." from rockynook (each for $10) * "The Quick Python Book 3e", "Serverless Architectures on AWS", "Event Streams in Action", "Get Programming with Haskell" from Manning (50% off) These sales are the only way I can afford the volume I read. Some of that money would have gone to OReilly authors, but they deleted my full cart with $100 worth of stuff before I could purchase! EDIT: OReilly catalog seemed large & redundant with publishers (packt) offering the same materials on their sites. Some like Wiley / MKP only offered very few items from their catalogs. Others like Rosenfeld / rockynook / no starch now provide DRM free options directly from their sites. I'm hoping at least OReilly reconsiders selling their Animal books again.
- j_s 9y ago
  Here is a quote of the Tweet for the lazy: Martin Kleppmann‏ @martinkl I am not happy about this. I believe readers should be able to get DRM-free eBook files to download to their own devices. 1:07 AM - 29 Jun 2017
  - adfm 9y ago
    Referenced below and applicable here, O'Reilly state they continue to support DRM-free formats (available from outlets that support them, like Google Play) and acknowledge the PDF issue in this post by Laura Baldwin. https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/the-mission-of-spreading-the-knowledge-of-innovators-continues https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/the-mission-of-spreading-the-k...
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acomjean 9y ago
I bought probably about 20 books on O'Reilly website. Mainly because they are typically of good quality but also because they're drm free. I always appreciated that they were available in any format (pdf/ebook etc) and thus easier to search. You can even sync them to your dropbox automatically after purchase. A download them. We had a book service at a former company and it was terrible, one page at a time with a clunky web interface. Being able to download and scan them was much appreciated. But as internet search gets better, you find quick solutions on stack overflow. It must be hard selling books.
- orbitingpluto 9y ago
  It annoys me to no end when you can't copy or click on a link in a magazine that is not DRM-free.
- tjl 9y ago
  I love the Dropbox sync, although I found it hit or miss. Some books it wouldn't work. But, I've bought at least 50 books from their site. I tried Safari when I was still in university, but found it terrible (but that was a few years back). I won't pay $400/year for a service like it. I could see maybe half that being reasonable. But, there are so many subscription services now.
orbitingpluto 9y ago
I was at a garage sale and I was perusing a bunch of Wrox books. The seller offered me a ridiculous price and then I noticed he was on the cover of one of them. I asked him about it and I think he'd rather have the latter benefits than the minuscule compensation: "Piracy is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it means you receive no compensation for the benefit readers get from the work you put in. On the other hand, pirated books act as implicit marketing, expanding awareness of you and your book(s)." So I bought the books, but asked if he had another copy of his own book. He said that he did not, because that he guesses he should keep a copy as, after all, he was the author. That's a lot of trauma for him to say something like that.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  That could be because in a typical deal the author gets an advance up front and the royalties are so meagre that that's all the money the author ever gets. In fact any initial advance is often calculated on this basis. A book has to sell exceptionally and unexpectedly well to start paying extra royalties. So... authors can make a little extra money by selling their five or ten free copies direct to the public. Even at a knock-down price, it's still money they wouldn't get otherwise. The piracy argument is nonsense. Most technology book authors either have a brand/platform because they're already notable, or they remain unknown, because it's almost impossible to build a brand solely by writing specialist technology books. (This wasn't always true, but it's become more and more true over time.) Piracy for "exposure" changes nothing. Given the royalty issue, it doesn't even affect most authors' earnings - although of course it does affect publisher income.
- gaius 9y ago
  I co-authored a Wrox book back in the day. Financially it was absolutely not worth it by itself. But if you were a consultant or speaker who could leverage "published author" into more engagements, then doing it would be a sound investment.
a3n 9y ago
I have given a few O'Reilly DRM-free books to colleagues. Younger colleagues, who usually have never heard of an "animal book." I always point out where it came from, and suggest that if they like it, they either buy it, or buy something else from O'Reilly. Maybe some did, I don't know. I suspect that the ones that didn't, probably wouldn't buy a similar book from anyone, not because of piracy, but because they just aren't into that particular kind of product. So no (real) harm, no foul.
joshmarinacci 9y ago
I sincerely doubt the change had anything to do with DRM. Book sales have been declining for years. Developers just don't use books as their primary source of learning anymore. I believe OReilly is going to double down on their subscription service, Safari.
hackerpolicy 9y ago
No more $5 dollar books by registering as a 'print-book owner'?
- sitkack 9y ago
  Gone.
guelo 9y ago
O'Reilly used to produce the definitive bibles that you were required to own to work on different technologies, but I feel like the quality has gone down over the last 10 years or so. I don't know if that is a byproduct of developers relying on books less, or technology moving faster, or poor publishing decisions. But it has probably contributed more than DRM, one way or the other, to their decline.
- subpixel 9y ago
  It turns out in 2017 innovators can spread their own knowledge, and sell their own multi-format ebooks in large numbers (keeping most of the revenue). If I had a tech book in me I'd be trying to steal from Wes Bos's playbook, not get on a call with an O'Reilly editor.
- gaius 9y ago
  In the 90s their "in a nutshell" books were worth their weight in gold. But you are right that tech is different now. A nutshell book from back then would be good for 5 or 10 years. Now the "shelf life" (haha) is a year at most before tech fashion moves on.
- jonlucc 9y ago
  Entirely anecdotally, but that is what slowed me down the past few years. I am not in the industry at all (biologist), so I'm usually very late to development technologies. I tried to pick up Laravel about a year ago, and I just don't like learning from videos, so I tried to find a decent book to get started. Almost every book from O'Reilly has reviews that say the code examples are nearly unusable. I don't really want to spend the time troubleshooting their examples instead of using that time on whatever brought me to the framework in the first place.
- blantonl 9y ago
  Exactly. Take for example the Sendmail book. Probably one of the most important (and feared) sysadmin books of our time. If you had a well worn dog eared copy on your desk, you commanded respect.
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sqldba 9y ago
They are my main source for PDF DRM free books (I don't care about stamping my name as long as it can be read anywhere). If they stop selling then they lose 100% of my business which is about $100 a year. I don't use other formats. They screw technical books too badly. Some other publishers like Apress and MS Press do okay too but if O'Reilly pulls out then it's quite a blow.
elcapitan 9y ago
> They can also reach buyers who want to see the full product before making a purchasing decision or who wouldn't become aware of your book through conventional marketing efforts. This is definitely true for me, and one of the reasons why Oreilly is one of the defining "colors" on my bookshelf. In particular with technical literature I really need to get a good look into the book before I make a commitment and a decision to buy. I just don't want to spend money first and then stick to something that turns out to be rather disappointing. So my usual way of buying books is to download various publications on a topic via Bittorrent and then buying the best one once I know what I want. This is similar to going to a public library, getting a few books, and buying the most convincing one for long-term use. If there was a micropayment way of paying for the short-term evaluation, I would be more than happy to pay for that (as I implicitly pay via library contributions, which go to the publishers to some part). Having said that, Oreilly traditionally had a market of being the "printed out manual of open source software", which I'm pretty sure is dead by now, and I wonder if they can reposition completely. One thing I noticed is that they now often sell books that have titles that sound very general "Data Science for blabla" but turn out to be really just tutorials/manuals for some particular framework. That's the kind of book I would want to avoid. Nothing against good examples, but I don't need printed out tutorials.
- nhangen 9y ago
  What makes you think that this is OK?
  - elcapitan 9y ago
    I don't think it is ok in a legal sense, but it is perfectly fine in a moral sense. I can spend any time I want in a bookstore or a library and read those books as well, and the way I use BT is exactly that. I don't care if corrupt lawmakers have illegalized that. I care for the people who make good books, and I do so by selecting the best of them and paying those.
  - chii 9y ago
    > What makes you think that this is OK? what makes you think this _shouldn't_ be OK?
newscracker 9y ago
> Piracy is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it means you receive no compensation for the benefit readers get from the work you put in. On the other hand, pirated books act as implicit marketing, expanding awareness of you and your book(s). They can also reach buyers who want to see the full product before making a purchasing decision or who wouldn't become aware of your book through conventional marketing efforts. The point I've emphasized above really matters a lot for people who do read many books. Despite select chapter previews that some publishers provide, there are people who really want to do their own evaluation of something before committing to buying it. > My feeling is that most people who choose pirated books are unlikely to pay for them, even if that's the only way to get them. As such, I'm inclined to think the marketing effect of illegal copies exceeds the lost revenue. I have no data to back me up. Maybe it's just a rationalization to help me live with the knowledge that no matter what you do, there's no way you can prevent bootleg copies of your books from showing up on the Net. Again, the emphasized sentence above has been known for a very long time in the areas of music, movies, TV shows, books - any content, actually. In my observation, people who pirate books also tend get into a habit of hoarding rather than reading (low disk/storage and bandwidth costs). Leaving aside the people who are in countries with poorer currencies and cannot really imagine buying a lot of the English language technical content produced, I doubt if the real loss in revenue is even substantial. Books also, depending on the subject, require investments of time, attention, memory and repeated reference, unlike movies, TV shows and music that most of the time require a "one time investment". So I would not consider books to be in the same category as others when it comes to piracy. I'm not at all happy with O'Reilly's decision, and did write to support at oreilly saying that this makes it difficult (finding DRM free content on amazon or elsewhere in multiple formats) and that I wouldn't be buying O'Reilly products again. I received a standard reply thanking me for the feedback and pointing me to the blog post. My guess is that the direct customer relationship and brand recognition through its website is going to be lost along with this decision. I don't know if O'Reilly will change the decision, but people who do value the freedom of DRM free content in different formats must voice their opinions by writing to O'Reilly support.
- chii 9y ago
  > I doubt if the real loss in revenue is even substantial. yes, i also agree. The content just needs to be made slightly difficult to pirate, to keep the honest people honest - but there's no need to invest in any expensive and difficult to maintain DRM (like an online check). Also, if content is easier to consume when pirated, then whose fault is it that more people would rather pirate than go though the official channel?
agibsonccc 9y ago
Disclaimer: I have commercial interest with oreilly. I speak at a ton of their conferences and lean on them partially for marketing and lead gen. Oreilly author here. FWIW a ton of us were caught off guard by this as well. At the same time, I can't say I'm surprised. My commercial incentives for working with oreilly wasn't about the book per se. I found a ton of value in working with them for their peripheral activities including safari, their strata , and AI conferences. I think other folks who write for oreilly tend to do these same things. Pointing out where oreilly is making money: It tends to be large companies paying for access to safari now. They will be putting other content in there now. Print is a dying media. That being said: A ton of people prefer print still. I don't think any end user or author of their's is "happy" about this per se. 1 benefit I liked of the online store was the ability to point people at that for pre releases and updates. You can't really do that with amazon. I may be naively hopeful in saying this, but.. That being said: this should allow them to invest in other distribution channels now as well. Oreilly showed they know how to run a distribution channel and may use that expertise in other areas. As someone closer to this than a lot of people, I'm happy to answer general questions about the process, other ways this could affect us etc, if that helps.
- eriknstr 9y ago
  Will the bookshelf I have on the O'Reilly website of books that I've paid for disappear and/or be replaced with DRMed files?
  - agibsonccc 9y ago
    From the oreilly website: Your Products Every ebook and video you’ve purchased through your O’Reilly account is available below. You get lifetime access to these products, and we will alert you when they are updated. This is your account. You should be fine here.
    - eriknstr 9y ago
      Thanks.
- 9y ago
shmerl 9y ago
I didn't quite get that. Will their books still be available DRM-free or not? If not, that's a major setback.
- tjl 9y ago
  Technically, they're saying Google will offer them DRM-free, but they're ePub and the PDFs are conversions from ePub. It looks like ebooks.com will offer ePub and PDF that are DRM-free too.
  - shmerl 9y ago
    Is it just cost reduction for them? Why can't they continue selling them from their site?
Animats 9y ago
That sounds more like O'Reilly gave up on fulfillment and went with Amazon, like everybody else.
- burntrelish1273 9y ago
  Monoculture monopoly leads to tyranny and gouging.
djhworld 9y ago
I like reading PDFs of books on my phone, especially on my commute. It works surprisingly well, better than I thought it would. My work bought a copy of Designing Data Intensive Applications for the team, I've started reading it but lugging around 1kg of book every day gets old really quick, I wish they would have offered a PDF download coupon or something inside.
djhworld 9y ago
I wonder why they still offer the Google Play versions as being "DRM free" Is it just Google has more weight they can throw around and O'Reilly didn't want to 'rock the boat', or was it a technical problem? Apparently the Google Play versions of O'Reilly books are formatted strangely and aren't a direct PDF of the physical books.
vbezhenar 9y ago
DRM-less PDF encourage me to buy books that I'm not going to read anytime soon, and I bought few books I didn't read yet and may be I won't read at all. But the point is, my PDF is always with me in my backups and no matter what happens with DRM software, platforms or publisher, I can always read them. That's important for me, I truly own this copy, not some stupid renting thing.
ninjakeyboard 9y ago
I published a book and have to admit that I have given it away to everyone who has any inkling of interest.
- voltagex_ 9y ago
  What's the book?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
epaulson 9y ago
DRM-free epubs are at least supposed to be available from Google Books (though Kleppmann says when he tried with his book it wasn't DRM-free) - the ebook.com folks say that they have DRM-free epub and PDFs, but I don't know if the PDFs are the high-quality print editions that ORA used to sell or the crappy epub-PDF conversion that Google books sells, and what exactly ebooks.com means by 'DRM-free' - they make reference to having to use a specific Adobe software package to read them, but that you have the right to print and copy-and-paste. Until I see it opened in some libre-PDF reader I don't know that I trust it. One bummer: Nearly everything I bought from O'Reilly were 'Early Release' books - The Kleppmann 'Data Intensive Apps' book took like two years for him to finish (not complaining, books aren't easy and this book was exceptionally well-researched), but it was nice to have the first half of the book available early on. Sadly, the Early Release program seems to be only available through Safari now. There were like five books I had planned to buy over the holiday weekend that now I guess I'll have to wait a year or so before being able to buy. I also don't get the folks saying "Just buy $DIFFERENT_PUBLISHER books instead" - books aren't interchangeable, people buy specific titles, not whatever the publisher's version of that topic might be.
- clumsysmurf 9y ago
  If I read these pages (1,2) from ebooks.com correctly, you need to read their PDFs in Adobe Digital Editions: "As our books have Adobe DRM applied to them your device must state that it is compatible with Adobe DRM or Adobe Digital Editions" Some time ago, there was a big fiasco with Adobe (3,4) "On 6 October 2014, Nate Hoffelder reported in The Digital Reader that Adobe Digital Editions version 4 ("ADE4") was sending extensive information about eBooks back to Adobe, including ebooks read by a user as well as eBooks stored on the same machine but not opened in ADE4." I tried Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) a while back and considered it very poor experience. Originally it was based on Adobe Flex, and the font rendering was grey scale anti-aliased and looked terrible. I won't try it again to find out if they improved it. There was another fiasco, but Adobe backed down (5). A contact from Datalogics confirmed that Adobe was going to force everyone (publishers, users) to upgrade to the new version of DRM (ADEPT) and that your old titles would be unusable if not! I avoid ADE like the plague. (1) https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/213875366-Guide-to-ebook-formats https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/213875366-Guide... (2) https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/206061173-Reading-your-ebook https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/206061173-Readi... (3) https://the-digital-reader.com/2014/10/06/adobe-spying-users-collecting-data-ebook-libraries https://the-digital-reader.com/2014/10/06/adobe-spying-users... (4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Digital_Editions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Digital_Editions (5) https://the-digital-reader.com/2014/02/03/adobe-require-new-epub-drm-july-expects-abandon-existing-users/ https://the-digital-reader.com/2014/02/03/adobe-require-new-...
davidf18 9y ago
I liked using the O'Reilly early release program available from the site (as well as Manning's MEAP program). Is there any replacement for that now? I also prefer the PDF versions which I can print out a chapter when I need to read hard-copy Instead of carrying with me an entire book (live/work in Manhattan, we don't use cars much and value light-weight equipment).
- tjl 9y ago
  I prefer PDF versions because they're formatted nicely. I find that ePub and Mobi versions of technical books almost uniformly terrible.
  - billpollock 9y ago
    Completely agree.
starsinspace 9y ago
So does anyone know of another online bookstore that is completely DRM-free? I mean both hard DRM (encryption) and soft DRM (watermarking, be it visible or invisible). That O'Reilly was completely DRM-free (AFAICT) made me spend quite an amount of money on their eBooks over the years... I wonder who wants to serve that market in the future? It seems that all the other options at least do watermarking, which makes it uninteresting to me. Guess I'll have to buy everything as print books again...
- billpollock 9y ago
  All of our ebooks have always been DRM-free. That's true for some other publishers, too.
  - starsinspace 9y ago
    That's great! I had bought several of your books from O'Reilly -- I will head to your store directly then in the future.
- tjl 9y ago
  I've never really had a problem with the watermarking in the footer with the person who bought it. It's out of my way so I tend to forget about it.

185 points by SeanBoocock 9y ago

When I discovered books at OReilly I thought I had stumbled into heaven. I bought a couple hundred books over several years. I thought they "get it." No longer. Companies are starting to get serious about product and service lock-in, for me and many others the paradigm is repellent.

daeken 9y ago

The conclusion here (to paraphrase: "no DRM isn't a big enough draw") doesn't seem to be at all supported. It may be that they want to focus on publishing; it may be that they simply had to charge too much; it may be that it wasn't bringing in enough sales to make it worthwhile, compared to other retail channels. Without more data (or really... any), this conclusion is pure speculation.

llasram 9y ago
I think the broad market trends are pretty suggestive -- consumers in general don't care about DRM or wouldn't see e.g. Amazon's success in the ebook business. For more specifics I think we'd need hyper-detailed data. For example, how many people consider Google's use of the broken ACS4 DRM "close enough" to DRM-free?
ahkurtz 9y ago
Yeah, I completely agree, but the OP is speculation too, because it's from Scott Myers's reading of a blog post. If you go read his linked blog post (from Laura Baldwin, President of O'Reilly media) you can see they explain many different aspects of their decision. Not once do they mention DRM in a negative way (only apologizing for no longer offering it in multiple formats via their store). In fact, they mention explicitly that Google will still publish their content DRM free. The reasons they give for discontinuing their e-commerce efforts are that book sales have been dwindling since 2000, and that they simply make too much money on new interactive media and don't want to pay for their own e-commerce infrastructure and staff anymore. I would imagine the publishers they are now relying on can also help them market their titles (which I suggest speculatively would help significantly). The article I want to link from Laura Baldwin is unfortunately only directly linkable via social media, but for now it's the only article at this link: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oreilly-mission-spreading-knowledge-innovators-laura-baldwin https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oreilly-mission-spreading-kno... Anectdotally, I bought a lot of DRM free books from O'Reilly directly. While I did share them due to convenience (coworker doesn't understand SSL! No problem), I also shared them with friends who couldn't afford them. I think this was actually good for O'Reilly, and that Tim was right and still is on this score. I say this because I personally spent many thousands of dollars through their web store. My friends without cash who went on to become computer professionals started paying for the new books they wanted as well. The vast majority of people I shared books with who could afford them would go out and buy several more after seeing the quality and value of particular titles. It's obviously a culture and economic mechanism that subsidizes certain kinds of customers and use, but I believe it subsidized the "right things". Because much of the content builds value in real marketable skills, free-riders can eventually become wealthy enough that the price to convenience ratio tips correctly and they become paying customers. It helps that they now have very strong brand loyalty. This is how I became an O'Reilly customer in the first place, so many year ago. O'Reilly direct e-book sales was a positive example of business that creates huge uncaptured value for the domain (technical knowledge), but by virtue of that generates more customers. This is the kind of business we actually need. In some ways I think it was their own success that killed their book business, because ultimately digital books were replaced by more compelling media formats, and those exist largely due to advances in design and technology, and their books are raw fuel for those advances. I say this many words only because I loved them so much, and am sad to see them go. I have to sadly admit it's been probably two years since I either read or bought a lot of titles from them. I haven't been reading or buying technical books at all. I don't know if this says something about my current level of specialization, perhaps my current level of laziness, my subconscious desire for new media formats, the quality of the titles they've been publishing, their business model, or perhaps the nature of the industry they serve. I'd personally like to hear more from O'Reilly about this eventually. I know they need to spin everything to look good, but I am incredibly curious if their non-book media is actually increasingly popular as they suggest. Do people just not want technical books anymore? Do people want them but increasingly pirate them and never pay? Are people willing to pay for technical knowledge in different media? Did their business model cost them their business, or is this the result of unavoidable change in the market for technical knowledge?
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  Technology titles live on the usual bell curve. The less sophisticated and expert the audience, the bigger the potential sales. As you go up in expertise titles become increasingly niche - and harder to write well - but potential sales become more limited. The biggest sellers were always mass-market guides to Windows, OS X, Word, iOS, and such. The next tier down were introductory guides to core topics - HTML/CSS, js, Java, Flash, VisualBasic, and on on. The tier down from that was much more specific - e.g. sound on iOS - but only of interest to a relatively small audience. Eventually publishers hit a point where they can't find good expert authors because the money for writing a book is so poor compared to a typical developer salary, and the amount of work so high, that no one wants to do it. And even if they do they probably need a lot of help with editing and formatting. StackOverflow and other online sources have more or less wiped out the lower levels. Changes in the industry have wiped out the upper levels - hardly anyone needs an introduction to Windows now, and even an intro to HTML/CSS is much harder to sell than it used to be. That leaves the niche-y, limited, specialised levels - which aren't big enough on their own to support the old publishing model, except as a cottage industry. Aside from author advances, the production costs of a book don't depend on the technical level of the content. So this is why the industry is struggling. Meanwhile lynda.com, Udemy, and other courseware are cleaning up in the same space. So of course O'Reilly, Wiley, and the rest are going to try to make a play for that space. And IMO they will fail, because the costs of producing courseware are much higher than the costs of producing a book, the courseware business requires an even more specialised skill set, the market isn't huge anyway - and more than anything, they're late to the party.
  - billpollock 9y ago
    Some of this is true, but it's still possible to be a successful technical book publisher.
    - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
      Indeed. But it's rather harder to be a successful technical book author.

rst 9y ago

Perhaps best read after the blog post from current O'Reilly media president Laura Baldwin, which makes two important points: 1) Book sales have been consistently declining overall, in all media. It's not clear that DRM has much to do with this. 2) They'll still be selling DRM-free through at least one merchant, Google Play. (It's not clear whether this policy extends to Amazon as well, but they wouldn't be the first publisher selling DRM-free there; Tor's science fiction novels have been DRM-free through all merchants for a few years now.) Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oreilly-mission-spreading-knowledge-innovators-laura-baldwin https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oreilly-mission-spreading-kno...

clumsysmurf 9y ago
But there are no DRM free high quality PDFs ... if you download a PDF from Play Books its a conversion.
- Buttons840 9y ago
  Can you given some more details? A screen shot demonstrating the low quality would be nice. Not that I don't what your saying. Hopefully OReilly wanted only to cut costs, and is still willing to make high quality preorders and DRM free media available through some other source.
  - nindalf 9y ago
    Here's a guy who shared a side-by-side comparison of Google and O' Reilly's editions of Designing Data Intensive Applications - https://mobile.twitter.com/kondrej/status/880540236303880193 https://mobile.twitter.com/kondrej/status/880540236303880193
    - jacobolus 9y ago
      That seems to be two different screenshots of different parts of the Google version. The typesetting is pretty bad.
    - 9y ago

reidacdc 9y ago

The death of the DRM-free model was a big concern to me, but a recent supplementary blog post from Laura Baldwin, linked-to in the article but not called out, seems to claim that O'Reilly books will still be available DRM-free from Google Books. It's not clear to me if this means the Google Play e-book store, or something else. Blog post here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oreilly-mission-spreading-knowledge-innovators-laura-baldwin https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oreilly-mission-spreading-kno...

llasram 9y ago
I'm just a consumer, but Google Play Books are in fact available for DRM-free download when so-requested by the publisher. Or least that's the reason Google gives when directly providing the book as a DRM-free download.
- runevault 9y ago
  Check other comments, they aren't the quality PDFs previously available from the O'Reilly site, but crappy conversions from epub.
  - sqldba 9y ago
    Yeah. Also I'd rather not give Google my money. If something goes wrong I don't like my chances of getting it back. At least with O'Reilly you could talk to a human.

clumsysmurf 9y ago

Tim O'Reilly once said "Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy". I discovered and purchased almost every Rosenfeld Media book from OReilly. After O'Reilly moved to DRM-free books, their 2009 sales went up by 104% http://toc.oreilly.com/2010/01/2009-oreilly-ebook-revenue-up-104-percent.html http://toc.oreilly.com/2010/01/2009-oreilly-ebook-revenue-up... In other interviews, he seemed confident that DRM wasn't worth it https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0411/focus-tim-oreilly-media-e-book-antipiracy-steal-this.html https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0411/focus-tim-oreilly-me... Perhaps some part of the equation has changed since then. I'm looking forward a deeper analysis of the business reasons for this. I'm also interested to hear what more authors think - I wonder how many agree with Martin Kleppmann (Designing Data Intensive Applications) https://twitter.com/martinkl/status/880336943980085248 https://twitter.com/martinkl/status/880336943980085248 This independence day weekend there were a lot of sales, so I purchased: * "Programming Clojure, Third Edition" from pragprog (30% off sale) * The entire collection of "Enthusiast's Guide to ..." from rockynook (each for $10) * "The Quick Python Book 3e", "Serverless Architectures on AWS", "Event Streams in Action", "Get Programming with Haskell" from Manning (50% off) These sales are the only way I can afford the volume I read. Some of that money would have gone to OReilly authors, but they deleted my full cart with $100 worth of stuff before I could purchase! EDIT: OReilly catalog seemed large & redundant with publishers (packt) offering the same materials on their sites. Some like Wiley / MKP only offered very few items from their catalogs. Others like Rosenfeld / rockynook / no starch now provide DRM free options directly from their sites. I'm hoping at least OReilly reconsiders selling their Animal books again.

j_s 9y ago
Here is a quote of the Tweet for the lazy: Martin Kleppmann‏ @martinkl I am not happy about this. I believe readers should be able to get DRM-free eBook files to download to their own devices. 1:07 AM - 29 Jun 2017
- adfm 9y ago
  Referenced below and applicable here, O'Reilly state they continue to support DRM-free formats (available from outlets that support them, like Google Play) and acknowledge the PDF issue in this post by Laura Baldwin. https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/the-mission-of-spreading-the-knowledge-of-innovators-continues https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/the-mission-of-spreading-the-k...

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acomjean 9y ago

I bought probably about 20 books on O'Reilly website. Mainly because they are typically of good quality but also because they're drm free. I always appreciated that they were available in any format (pdf/ebook etc) and thus easier to search. You can even sync them to your dropbox automatically after purchase. A download them. We had a book service at a former company and it was terrible, one page at a time with a clunky web interface. Being able to download and scan them was much appreciated. But as internet search gets better, you find quick solutions on stack overflow. It must be hard selling books.

orbitingpluto 9y ago
It annoys me to no end when you can't copy or click on a link in a magazine that is not DRM-free.
tjl 9y ago
I love the Dropbox sync, although I found it hit or miss. Some books it wouldn't work. But, I've bought at least 50 books from their site. I tried Safari when I was still in university, but found it terrible (but that was a few years back). I won't pay $400/year for a service like it. I could see maybe half that being reasonable. But, there are so many subscription services now.

orbitingpluto 9y ago

I was at a garage sale and I was perusing a bunch of Wrox books. The seller offered me a ridiculous price and then I noticed he was on the cover of one of them. I asked him about it and I think he'd rather have the latter benefits than the minuscule compensation: "Piracy is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it means you receive no compensation for the benefit readers get from the work you put in. On the other hand, pirated books act as implicit marketing, expanding awareness of you and your book(s)." So I bought the books, but asked if he had another copy of his own book. He said that he did not, because that he guesses he should keep a copy as, after all, he was the author. That's a lot of trauma for him to say something like that.

TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
That could be because in a typical deal the author gets an advance up front and the royalties are so meagre that that's all the money the author ever gets. In fact any initial advance is often calculated on this basis. A book has to sell exceptionally and unexpectedly well to start paying extra royalties. So... authors can make a little extra money by selling their five or ten free copies direct to the public. Even at a knock-down price, it's still money they wouldn't get otherwise. The piracy argument is nonsense. Most technology book authors either have a brand/platform because they're already notable, or they remain unknown, because it's almost impossible to build a brand solely by writing specialist technology books. (This wasn't always true, but it's become more and more true over time.) Piracy for "exposure" changes nothing. Given the royalty issue, it doesn't even affect most authors' earnings - although of course it does affect publisher income.
gaius 9y ago
I co-authored a Wrox book back in the day. Financially it was absolutely not worth it by itself. But if you were a consultant or speaker who could leverage "published author" into more engagements, then doing it would be a sound investment.

a3n 9y ago

I have given a few O'Reilly DRM-free books to colleagues. Younger colleagues, who usually have never heard of an "animal book." I always point out where it came from, and suggest that if they like it, they either buy it, or buy something else from O'Reilly. Maybe some did, I don't know. I suspect that the ones that didn't, probably wouldn't buy a similar book from anyone, not because of piracy, but because they just aren't into that particular kind of product. So no (real) harm, no foul.

joshmarinacci 9y ago

I sincerely doubt the change had anything to do with DRM. Book sales have been declining for years. Developers just don't use books as their primary source of learning anymore. I believe OReilly is going to double down on their subscription service, Safari.

hackerpolicy 9y ago

No more $5 dollar books by registering as a 'print-book owner'?

sitkack 9y ago
Gone.

guelo 9y ago

O'Reilly used to produce the definitive bibles that you were required to own to work on different technologies, but I feel like the quality has gone down over the last 10 years or so. I don't know if that is a byproduct of developers relying on books less, or technology moving faster, or poor publishing decisions. But it has probably contributed more than DRM, one way or the other, to their decline.

subpixel 9y ago
It turns out in 2017 innovators can spread their own knowledge, and sell their own multi-format ebooks in large numbers (keeping most of the revenue). If I had a tech book in me I'd be trying to steal from Wes Bos's playbook, not get on a call with an O'Reilly editor.
gaius 9y ago
In the 90s their "in a nutshell" books were worth their weight in gold. But you are right that tech is different now. A nutshell book from back then would be good for 5 or 10 years. Now the "shelf life" (haha) is a year at most before tech fashion moves on.
jonlucc 9y ago
Entirely anecdotally, but that is what slowed me down the past few years. I am not in the industry at all (biologist), so I'm usually very late to development technologies. I tried to pick up Laravel about a year ago, and I just don't like learning from videos, so I tried to find a decent book to get started. Almost every book from O'Reilly has reviews that say the code examples are nearly unusable. I don't really want to spend the time troubleshooting their examples instead of using that time on whatever brought me to the framework in the first place.
blantonl 9y ago
Exactly. Take for example the Sendmail book. Probably one of the most important (and feared) sysadmin books of our time. If you had a well worn dog eared copy on your desk, you commanded respect.
- 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

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sqldba 9y ago

They are my main source for PDF DRM free books (I don't care about stamping my name as long as it can be read anywhere). If they stop selling then they lose 100% of my business which is about $100 a year. I don't use other formats. They screw technical books too badly. Some other publishers like Apress and MS Press do okay too but if O'Reilly pulls out then it's quite a blow.

elcapitan 9y ago

> They can also reach buyers who want to see the full product before making a purchasing decision or who wouldn't become aware of your book through conventional marketing efforts. This is definitely true for me, and one of the reasons why Oreilly is one of the defining "colors" on my bookshelf. In particular with technical literature I really need to get a good look into the book before I make a commitment and a decision to buy. I just don't want to spend money first and then stick to something that turns out to be rather disappointing. So my usual way of buying books is to download various publications on a topic via Bittorrent and then buying the best one once I know what I want. This is similar to going to a public library, getting a few books, and buying the most convincing one for long-term use. If there was a micropayment way of paying for the short-term evaluation, I would be more than happy to pay for that (as I implicitly pay via library contributions, which go to the publishers to some part). Having said that, Oreilly traditionally had a market of being the "printed out manual of open source software", which I'm pretty sure is dead by now, and I wonder if they can reposition completely. One thing I noticed is that they now often sell books that have titles that sound very general "Data Science for blabla" but turn out to be really just tutorials/manuals for some particular framework. That's the kind of book I would want to avoid. Nothing against good examples, but I don't need printed out tutorials.

nhangen 9y ago
What makes you think that this is OK?
- elcapitan 9y ago
  I don't think it is ok in a legal sense, but it is perfectly fine in a moral sense. I can spend any time I want in a bookstore or a library and read those books as well, and the way I use BT is exactly that. I don't care if corrupt lawmakers have illegalized that. I care for the people who make good books, and I do so by selecting the best of them and paying those.
- chii 9y ago
  > What makes you think that this is OK? what makes you think this _shouldn't_ be OK?

newscracker 9y ago

> Piracy is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it means you receive no compensation for the benefit readers get from the work you put in. On the other hand, pirated books act as implicit marketing, expanding awareness of you and your book(s). They can also reach buyers who want to see the full product before making a purchasing decision or who wouldn't become aware of your book through conventional marketing efforts. The point I've emphasized above really matters a lot for people who do read many books. Despite select chapter previews that some publishers provide, there are people who really want to do their own evaluation of something before committing to buying it. > My feeling is that most people who choose pirated books are unlikely to pay for them, even if that's the only way to get them. As such, I'm inclined to think the marketing effect of illegal copies exceeds the lost revenue. I have no data to back me up. Maybe it's just a rationalization to help me live with the knowledge that no matter what you do, there's no way you can prevent bootleg copies of your books from showing up on the Net. Again, the emphasized sentence above has been known for a very long time in the areas of music, movies, TV shows, books - any content, actually. In my observation, people who pirate books also tend get into a habit of hoarding rather than reading (low disk/storage and bandwidth costs). Leaving aside the people who are in countries with poorer currencies and cannot really imagine buying a lot of the English language technical content produced, I doubt if the real loss in revenue is even substantial. Books also, depending on the subject, require investments of time, attention, memory and repeated reference, unlike movies, TV shows and music that most of the time require a "one time investment". So I would not consider books to be in the same category as others when it comes to piracy. I'm not at all happy with O'Reilly's decision, and did write to support at oreilly saying that this makes it difficult (finding DRM free content on amazon or elsewhere in multiple formats) and that I wouldn't be buying O'Reilly products again. I received a standard reply thanking me for the feedback and pointing me to the blog post. My guess is that the direct customer relationship and brand recognition through its website is going to be lost along with this decision. I don't know if O'Reilly will change the decision, but people who do value the freedom of DRM free content in different formats must voice their opinions by writing to O'Reilly support.

chii 9y ago
> I doubt if the real loss in revenue is even substantial. yes, i also agree. The content just needs to be made slightly difficult to pirate, to keep the honest people honest - but there's no need to invest in any expensive and difficult to maintain DRM (like an online check). Also, if content is easier to consume when pirated, then whose fault is it that more people would rather pirate than go though the official channel?

agibsonccc 9y ago

Disclaimer: I have commercial interest with oreilly. I speak at a ton of their conferences and lean on them partially for marketing and lead gen. Oreilly author here. FWIW a ton of us were caught off guard by this as well. At the same time, I can't say I'm surprised. My commercial incentives for working with oreilly wasn't about the book per se. I found a ton of value in working with them for their peripheral activities including safari, their strata , and AI conferences. I think other folks who write for oreilly tend to do these same things. Pointing out where oreilly is making money: It tends to be large companies paying for access to safari now. They will be putting other content in there now. Print is a dying media. That being said: A ton of people prefer print still. I don't think any end user or author of their's is "happy" about this per se. 1 benefit I liked of the online store was the ability to point people at that for pre releases and updates. You can't really do that with amazon. I may be naively hopeful in saying this, but.. That being said: this should allow them to invest in other distribution channels now as well. Oreilly showed they know how to run a distribution channel and may use that expertise in other areas. As someone closer to this than a lot of people, I'm happy to answer general questions about the process, other ways this could affect us etc, if that helps.

eriknstr 9y ago
Will the bookshelf I have on the O'Reilly website of books that I've paid for disappear and/or be replaced with DRMed files?
- agibsonccc 9y ago
  From the oreilly website: Your Products Every ebook and video you’ve purchased through your O’Reilly account is available below. You get lifetime access to these products, and we will alert you when they are updated. This is your account. You should be fine here.
  - eriknstr 9y ago
    Thanks.
9y ago

shmerl 9y ago

I didn't quite get that. Will their books still be available DRM-free or not? If not, that's a major setback.

tjl 9y ago
Technically, they're saying Google will offer them DRM-free, but they're ePub and the PDFs are conversions from ePub. It looks like ebooks.com will offer ePub and PDF that are DRM-free too.
- shmerl 9y ago
  Is it just cost reduction for them? Why can't they continue selling them from their site?

Animats 9y ago

That sounds more like O'Reilly gave up on fulfillment and went with Amazon, like everybody else.

burntrelish1273 9y ago
Monoculture monopoly leads to tyranny and gouging.

djhworld 9y ago

I like reading PDFs of books on my phone, especially on my commute. It works surprisingly well, better than I thought it would. My work bought a copy of Designing Data Intensive Applications for the team, I've started reading it but lugging around 1kg of book every day gets old really quick, I wish they would have offered a PDF download coupon or something inside.

djhworld 9y ago

I wonder why they still offer the Google Play versions as being "DRM free" Is it just Google has more weight they can throw around and O'Reilly didn't want to 'rock the boat', or was it a technical problem? Apparently the Google Play versions of O'Reilly books are formatted strangely and aren't a direct PDF of the physical books.

vbezhenar 9y ago

DRM-less PDF encourage me to buy books that I'm not going to read anytime soon, and I bought few books I didn't read yet and may be I won't read at all. But the point is, my PDF is always with me in my backups and no matter what happens with DRM software, platforms or publisher, I can always read them. That's important for me, I truly own this copy, not some stupid renting thing.

ninjakeyboard 9y ago

I published a book and have to admit that I have given it away to everyone who has any inkling of interest.

voltagex_ 9y ago
What's the book?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

epaulson 9y ago

DRM-free epubs are at least supposed to be available from Google Books (though Kleppmann says when he tried with his book it wasn't DRM-free) - the ebook.com folks say that they have DRM-free epub and PDFs, but I don't know if the PDFs are the high-quality print editions that ORA used to sell or the crappy epub-PDF conversion that Google books sells, and what exactly ebooks.com means by 'DRM-free' - they make reference to having to use a specific Adobe software package to read them, but that you have the right to print and copy-and-paste. Until I see it opened in some libre-PDF reader I don't know that I trust it. One bummer: Nearly everything I bought from O'Reilly were 'Early Release' books - The Kleppmann 'Data Intensive Apps' book took like two years for him to finish (not complaining, books aren't easy and this book was exceptionally well-researched), but it was nice to have the first half of the book available early on. Sadly, the Early Release program seems to be only available through Safari now. There were like five books I had planned to buy over the holiday weekend that now I guess I'll have to wait a year or so before being able to buy. I also don't get the folks saying "Just buy $DIFFERENT_PUBLISHER books instead" - books aren't interchangeable, people buy specific titles, not whatever the publisher's version of that topic might be.

clumsysmurf 9y ago
If I read these pages (1,2) from ebooks.com correctly, you need to read their PDFs in Adobe Digital Editions: "As our books have Adobe DRM applied to them your device must state that it is compatible with Adobe DRM or Adobe Digital Editions" Some time ago, there was a big fiasco with Adobe (3,4) "On 6 October 2014, Nate Hoffelder reported in The Digital Reader that Adobe Digital Editions version 4 ("ADE4") was sending extensive information about eBooks back to Adobe, including ebooks read by a user as well as eBooks stored on the same machine but not opened in ADE4." I tried Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) a while back and considered it very poor experience. Originally it was based on Adobe Flex, and the font rendering was grey scale anti-aliased and looked terrible. I won't try it again to find out if they improved it. There was another fiasco, but Adobe backed down (5). A contact from Datalogics confirmed that Adobe was going to force everyone (publishers, users) to upgrade to the new version of DRM (ADEPT) and that your old titles would be unusable if not! I avoid ADE like the plague. (1) https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/213875366-Guide-to-ebook-formats https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/213875366-Guide... (2) https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/206061173-Reading-your-ebook https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/206061173-Readi... (3) https://the-digital-reader.com/2014/10/06/adobe-spying-users-collecting-data-ebook-libraries https://the-digital-reader.com/2014/10/06/adobe-spying-users... (4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Digital_Editions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Digital_Editions (5) https://the-digital-reader.com/2014/02/03/adobe-require-new-epub-drm-july-expects-abandon-existing-users/ https://the-digital-reader.com/2014/02/03/adobe-require-new-...

davidf18 9y ago

I liked using the O'Reilly early release program available from the site (as well as Manning's MEAP program). Is there any replacement for that now? I also prefer the PDF versions which I can print out a chapter when I need to read hard-copy Instead of carrying with me an entire book (live/work in Manhattan, we don't use cars much and value light-weight equipment).

tjl 9y ago
I prefer PDF versions because they're formatted nicely. I find that ePub and Mobi versions of technical books almost uniformly terrible.
- billpollock 9y ago
  Completely agree.

starsinspace 9y ago

So does anyone know of another online bookstore that is completely DRM-free? I mean both hard DRM (encryption) and soft DRM (watermarking, be it visible or invisible). That O'Reilly was completely DRM-free (AFAICT) made me spend quite an amount of money on their eBooks over the years... I wonder who wants to serve that market in the future? It seems that all the other options at least do watermarking, which makes it uninteresting to me. Guess I'll have to buy everything as print books again...

billpollock 9y ago
All of our ebooks have always been DRM-free. That's true for some other publishers, too.
- starsinspace 9y ago
  That's great! I had bought several of your books from O'Reilly -- I will head to your store directly then in the future.
tjl 9y ago
I've never really had a problem with the watermarking in the footer with the person who bought it. It's out of my way so I tend to forget about it.