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OReilly had DRM free books to buy. I bought a bunch. But Piracy killed it, so now its subscription service, or available on kindle (I don't use). Some authors
by acomjean 6y ago
OReilly had DRM free books to buy. I bought a bunch.
But Piracy killed it, so now its subscription service, or available on kindle (I don't use). Some authors seem to have deals to give away their books and sell them at the same time: e.g.: https://www.tidyverse.org/learn/ https://www.tidyverse.org/learn/
I buy some DRM free books from Manning. They put a footer on each page, saying, licensed to: xxxxxxx@yyyyy.com to discourage me from sharing. It doesn't bother me.
Manning also seems to be going a sort of subscription route too. They have "live book" where you buy access to parts of books you want with tokens. Its kinda interesting how they're trying to do micropayments.
https://www.manning.com/livebook-program https://www.manning.com/livebook-program
- kyleee 6y agoDid piracy really kill OReilly's previous business model? I was sad when they morphed into a weird subscription service
- acomjean 6y agoI can find a specific reference, but it they made a bid deal of being DRM free a decade ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2368560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2368560 If ebook sales where working well, I suspect they wouldn't have gotten rid of them.
- aplusbi 6y agoThey still sell DRM free books, just through other stores like Google Play. The reason they switched to subscriptions was because of the cost of running an ebook store and the low ROI.