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I have Safari, and find it to be a poor value. Here are a few reasons (1) you can't read books in your browser while offline (2) many publishers don't contribu

I have Safari, and find it to be a poor value. Here are a few reasons (1) you can't read books in your browser while offline (2) many publishers don't contribute to Safari (Springer, MIT Press, etc) (3) publishers that are technically on Safari don't publish their whole catalog (Wiley) (4) Publishers that are on Safari, and do publish their whole catalog, may take months, a year even to put their books online (Wrox). (5) A lot of the books in the catalog are from Packt, which I consider noise. So, while I do have Safari, I use it as a last resort and buy the DRM-free PDFs from publishers that have then (Manning, Prag Prog, etc) even if they are in Safari. This past week, my account got corrupted. I lost about one years worth of Playlists that I put much effort into curating. All gone. Support was able to get me a CSV file of a known good state, but its going to be a PITA to manually recreate everything again. I might not bother.

vector_spaces 7y ago
I wish Springer titles were available on SBO -- that would make the service worthwhile for me. As it stands, I consider it a good value, but only barely, and for many of the points you have raised. That said, I can't fault them for having every publisher's catalog, since their focus seems to be on software and software-adjacent subjects. The publishers you mentioned have vast catalogs largely in areas outside of their sweet spot. With regard to your account being corrupted, yikes -- I'm sorry that happened, and I can't say I'm super surprised. I've always found their playlists and "recently read" UI to be buggy to the point that I don't really bother much with it. For example, items "recently read" on their mobile app don't seem to sync with desktop/browser and vice versa. I will also say that their recent embrace of dark patterns has been bumming me out -- aggressive marketing modals on login goading me into attending one of their live seminars, and breaking basic browser functionality (eg copy -- you can surprisingly copy text from inside books in SBO, but it will almost certainly be a bad time for you when you eventually try to paste it somewhere), among others.

vector_spaces 7y ago

I wish Springer titles were available on SBO -- that would make the service worthwhile for me. As it stands, I consider it a good value, but only barely, and for many of the points you have raised. That said, I can't fault them for having every publisher's catalog, since their focus seems to be on software and software-adjacent subjects. The publishers you mentioned have vast catalogs largely in areas outside of their sweet spot. With regard to your account being corrupted, yikes -- I'm sorry that happened, and I can't say I'm super surprised. I've always found their playlists and "recently read" UI to be buggy to the point that I don't really bother much with it. For example, items "recently read" on their mobile app don't seem to sync with desktop/browser and vice versa. I will also say that their recent embrace of dark patterns has been bumming me out -- aggressive marketing modals on login goading me into attending one of their live seminars, and breaking basic browser functionality (eg copy -- you can surprisingly copy text from inside books in SBO, but it will almost certainly be a bad time for you when you eventually try to paste it somewhere), among others.