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No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me
- alebaffa 11mo agoI agree O'Reilly is way too expensive.
- tombert 11mo agoI get the O’Reilly subscription through the ACM. It’s an extra $75 a year after a regular ACM membership. A lot less than $500/year.
- crazysim 11mo agoFor those curious about the ACM membership: https://www.acm.org/membership/membership-options https://www.acm.org/membership/membership-options
- aaaaaaron 11mo agoIs this ACM membership worth it?
- helsinkiandrew 11mo agoIf your paying $500 for an O’Reilly subscription, then the $99 membership plus $75 add-on for O'Reilly would seem to make it so even if you don't use any of the other facilities: > unlimited access to ACM's collection of thousands of online books, video courses, interactive sandboxes, practice labs, and AI-enabled tools from O'Reilly and Skillsoft Percipio
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- reader9274 11mo ago> ACM is pleased to share an important milestone for the computing field. Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library will be made open access.
- throw0101a 11mo ago> I get the O’Reilly subscription through the ACM. I get it through my library: * https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDMEDB0099&R=EDB0099 https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDMEDB00...
- thesurlydev 11mo agoFor a while, the O'Reilly subscription was included in the $99/yr ACM membership. Then they stopped offering O'Reilly for a bit. Then they brought it back as part of the $75 skills add-on. I feel like this is a little known secret (discount via ACM) that more folks should know about. Hopefully this post helps spread the word.
- leejoramo 11mo agoI do this too. It was a easy sell to my department
- 28304283409234 11mo agoEvery year O'Reilly has a cybermonday disccount of 40%. https://www.oreilly.com/online-learning/2025-cyber-sale.html?code=CYBERSAVE25 https://www.oreilly.com/online-learning/2025-cyber-sale.html...
- smartbit 11mo agoOne year, many years ago, they had an Cyber Monday offer for $299 indefinitely. I took it. Reading this and thinking of my consumption I start wondering if it is still worth it
- fruitplants 11mo agoDoes anyone know if Springer has any subscription discounts, access via library, etc? ACM does not include Springer.
- tailspin2019 11mo agoI don’t think you get the same level of access though? I tried an O’Reilly subscription directly then went the ACM route and remember being disappointed that it was a more limited subscription.
- user3939382 11mo agoThe big name companies in tech are mostly extractive nightmares including FAANG. Orielly is the least of our problems.
- AlexeyBrin 11mo agoI get it through my public library.
- AlexB138 11mo agoI just checked, and I've had an O'Reilly account since March of 2014 without major interruption, back when it was called Safari. It is by far the best source for high quality tech content out there. There is so much filler content in tech blogs, that I'm happy to pay to get access to high quality. I must be on some grandfathered plan though, as I'm not paying near $500/year. That is a very steep price.
- theli0nheart 11mo agoWhat are you paying?
- wrs 11mo agoAs another data point, I'm on an old plan for $199/year.
- AlexB138 11mo ago$199/year. I think it is worth that, but I don't think I'd pay much more.
- usr1106 11mo agoMy account is from 2007ish and even cheaper. I just hope there won't ever be a problem with my yearly payment because obviously they won't reopen it on old terms. Well, it's good business for them and for me. I can access books when it comes to my mind (not that often). They get the money. I would certainly never subscribe again at current rates.
- tech-ninja 11mo agoI also pay $200/year, well worth the cost for me.
- dboreham 11mo agoSame. Mine is grandfathered in price from long ago. I couldn't work without it, although LLMs are becoming a good substitute for some subjects. The mobile app is a roach motel though.
- charliesbot 11mo agoYeah, I agree about the O'Reilly app. It's pretty bad, so I'm actually thinking about just getting the book instead of using their app.
- gruntledfangler 11mo agoAt one time I worked at a research institute. It had a huge library that was only partially filled. One of the directors wanted to buy every developer their own Safari subscription. The cost was quoted at around $4K/mo IIRC. I pointed out that it would be far more cost–effective to simple let us request hard copies of whatever books we wanted, and then they would just stay in the library. No one worked remotely at the time. We ended up getting Safari subscriptions for everyone.
- teddyh 11mo agoIt’s capex vs. opex. A large enough company has a fixed budget for both, and for your situation, I assume that the opex budget had the funds, while the capex did not.
- thfuran 11mo agoThis separation and other accounting peculiarities like use it or lose it budgeting cause so much inefficiency.
- falcor84 11mo agoMaybe it's just some peculiarity I'm missing, but wouldn't a smaller capex sum be a pareto improvement over a larger opex? Is there any way in which denying the suggestion was rational?
- thfuran 11mo agoYes, spending less money is better than spending more money (though there can be potential tax treatment differences or other complexities depending on exactly how money is spent), but that doesn't mean the person in charge of approving an employee's expense is authorized to approve expenses however they please. If they're given a budget that says they get X money in one category and Y money in another, they can't spend (X-2Z, Y+Z) and can only choose to spend (X,Y) or deny the request. Big organizations often have a lot of inefficiencies due to process.
- DannyPage 11mo agoYou can quite often get a $300 yearly sub to O'Reilly, they run a discount ~4 times a year. That said, like a lot of other content subscriptions, it can be quite anxiety inducing to make it seem like you're getting your money's worth. I've gotten the sub via my work, and I think the labs and videos are quite good, plus the occasional opportunities to do live-chats with the authors. But you have to sift through a lot of content and dedicate a lot of hours to use them. For most folks, I think buying a few technical books a year as needed would be a much better use of time and money.
- joshvm 11mo agoAlso check if you're in education at any level. Most university libraries subscribe to what used to be Safari and you can SSO the full (enormous) catalogue. I didn't realize this for quite a long time as it's not widely advertised. There are ton of books that aren't the traditional animal-drawing tech titles, including Manning, as well as some lecture series. But the app is pretty kludgey and it's way more locked down than other publishers who will give you chapter PDFs. At least it's a good way to skim books to see if they're worth buying a physical copy.
- Finnucane 11mo agoMy university library has dropped their subscription, and they're pointing us at the local public library which still has it, for the moment.
- cauliflower99 11mo agoAnytime I'm asked for feedback via the O'Reilly website (I manage the business account for my company), the first thing I always say is that the app is unusable. I've tried it on my Amazon Fire Tablet, Ipad, different phones - it doesn't work. The user metrics in O'reilly (and probably most learning apps) has floored in the last 12 months. I see they've launched a new AI platform now. They're definitely going in a direction - time will tell if it's the right one. Personally, I'd love a website that can provide all the ebooks oreilly provides. But it needs to work on a tablet.
- whenc 11mo agoIt went un-noticed here, I think, but The Pragmatic Bookshelf recently fired most of its staff and are taking on no new books. In the email they sent to authors, they quoted a 40% YoY fall in non-fiction sales, industry-wide.
- vittore 11mo agoAnecdotal evidence, all books I bought this year were used.
- adamors 11mo agoWow, would be interested to read more about this, could you submit the email maybe as its own post? Even as a text version, I actually love the PragProg, would hate to seem them gone (but I guess it’s a foregone conclusion).
- whenc 11mo ago...
- sevenseacat 11mo agoI don't think this was supposed to be public knowledge.
- 11mo ago
- vittore 11mo agoIf you are in Bay area, San Francisco Public Library (sfpl.org) gives you access to O'Reilly for free, if you have library card, while it does not improve on usability issues, at 0 cost it is phenomenal resource.
- otterley 11mo agoSeattle Public Libraries (spl.org) also provides no-cost access to the O'Reilly Complete collection as a membership benefit. Support your local public library!
- Goofy_Coyote 11mo agoMy two problems with access through libraries is lack of app access, and that every time I login, all my progress is gone (not reset to cover - gone gone), and I have to find the resource again, open it and go to the page/time I was at. Also can’t create my own playlist or favorites. At least my library acts like that.
- vittore 11mo agoSame for SFPL. Majorly annoying.
- kens 11mo agoI already have a San Francisco Public Library card because it gives me access to some very useful archives, but I had no idea that I could access O'Reilly as well. Thanks for mentioning this!
- thih9 11mo ago> will most likely not make me renew my subscription for the new year. Given the price, it will be probably Will the author find the time and energy to actually cancel the subscription? The fact that he wrote the blog post and still haven’t cancelled makes me wonder.
- mindcrash 11mo agoFor me one of the best ways until now to get good quality IT books is (believe it or not): Humble Bundle (https://www.humblebundle.com/ https://www.humblebundle.com/) The past year they featured bundles from (quickly out of my head): O'Reilly, MIT Press, Manning, Pearson, Pragmatic Programmers and No Starch Press. Oh, and Packt. But I left that one out because the quality of most Packt books is total shit (IMO). It's the next best thing besides going on the seven seas if you want to reliably read IT related books on a ereader without spending a ton of money. (book bundles go for about $20 to $30 each, with most if of not all of them totaling up to $1000 or sometimes even more in value). If you're fast there's still time to get these right now: 15 Linux/DevOps related books from O'Reilly: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/linux-from-beginner-to-professional-oreilly-books-encore https://www.humblebundle.com/books/linux-from-beginner-to-pr... 20 Data Science/Data Engineering related books from O'Reilly: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/data-engineering-science-oreilly-books https://www.humblebundle.com/books/data-engineering-science-... 18 Hacking/Cybersec related books from No Starch: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/hacking-no-starch-books https://www.humblebundle.com/books/hacking-no-starch-books 19 Software Architecture related books from Pearson: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/software-architecture-pearson-books https://www.humblebundle.com/books/software-architecture-pea... 29 AI related books from Manning: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/ultimate-ai-algorithms-and-llms-manning-books https://www.humblebundle.com/books/ultimate-ai-algorithms-an... 21 Microsoft Certification prep books from Pearson: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/microsoft-certification-prep-microsoft-press-and-pearson https://www.humblebundle.com/books/microsoft-certification-p... 19 books on Software Strategy and Risk Management from Pragmatic Programmers: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/software-strategy-and-risk-management-pragmatic-programmers-books https://www.humblebundle.com/books/software-strategy-and-ris...
- jldugger 11mo agoI have O'Reilly subs available both from my employer and my local library. Doesn't fix the UI issues but does at least shift the ROI calculus. There are some applications that try to export O'Reilly books into Kindle formats, but every time I've tried they've mangled a few tables, formulas or sidebars, etc. I should probably sell or hand down my kindle and find something more suitable to O'Reilly.
- markus_zhang 11mo agoI have figured that I’m going to get exactly one CS hobby that is not work, and 0 CS hobby if I can find a job that fits the hobby. Then I figured there are less than ten books that I need to read, and probably less if I can get such a job because it is always a lot better to learn on the job. So I agree with the author that such subscription is not very useful, and a paper book + a paper notepad are way better than reading books on a tablet.
- riffic 11mo agothere is an O'Reilly plan for public libraries which is dope and accessible to those less privileged to afford premium access.
- 1313ed01 11mo agoI signed up many years ago when they had 50% off and then was allowed to renew at the same price. Made it very difficult to cancel, knowing that I will have to pay full price if I ever want it back, but one year I looked at how much I had paid in total for reading those books and decided to cancel anyway. Great site though. I never used the app, but mobile browser support was not bad. Paid for it to read computer books, and did a lot of that, but also discovered much else. They also had (have?) courses and paid video presentation. I noticed one series of videos I watched there would have cost more to watch legally than I paid for an entire year of O'Reilly.
- graypegg 11mo agoEvery library I've had a library card for (Toronto Public Library 7ish years ago, and BANQ Montréal) have had O'reilly subscriptions for free! A few other people have mentioned it in this thread with specific cities, but check your local one! It seems really common.
- mparnisari 11mo agoVancouver Public Library as well :) https://www.vpl.ca/digital-library/oreilly-technology-and-business-collection https://www.vpl.ca/digital-library/oreilly-technology-and-bu... Though I wish I could check them out on my Kobo...
- zargon 11mo agoI'm grandfathered in at $200/year from the Safari days. The main advantage of the subscription to me is being able to evaluate several books on a topic to pick the one that is the best fit for what I need. If I knew which books were best in category, it would be cheaper for me to just buy those specific books (or video courses, for things like Blender). But if I had to pay the current $500 price, I wouldn't be a subscriber.
- tech-ninja 11mo agoAgreed, I'm also on a $200/year plan and for me too the fact that I can skim multiple books on a single topic before settling on one is well worth the money.
- begueradj 11mo ago> Unfortunately, I cannot read technical books fast and definitely not fast enough to make the subscription be worth $500 per year. Reading is never about being fast at doing it. If you don't want to read a book, read it fast.
- NetMageSCW 11mo agoI read technical material faster than non-technical at about 900 WPM, and with excellent retention. Some people just read fast.
- giantrobot 11mo agoThe moment O'Reilly went subscription-only they lost me as a customer. I have a huge library of O'Reilly books I've purchased as PDFs. Shit I've got a huge library of print O'Reilly books despite years of slimming down. It really sucked because I've been learning from O'Reilly books for thirty years. But I've become fundamentally opposed to DRM on media and subscription-only access is the ultimate DRM. I don't have any desire to be locked into their app to access stuff I paid for and be at the whims of their poor UI decisions.
- daveoc64 11mo agoThey do still sell all of their books - just not directly on their website. Whenever possible, they're sold without DRM.
- giantrobot 11mo agoWhich is fine but they ruined their direct DRM-free sales. You used to get access to a PDF, epub, and mobi version of a book with no DRM. They even conveniently allowed you to sync your purchases to Dropbox. It was awesome. Now you have to hope something g you're interested in ends up in a Humble Bundle or something. The situation is worse in every way for a end users.
- bencornia 11mo agoIt would be such a dream if I could get an ebook, pdf, and physical copy. I love O'Reilly books and have been lucky to have access the last few years because of school.
- giantrobot 11mo agoThey used to do a "digital upgrade" where you could get the digital version of a book if you had the physical copy. There was no verification on their end and it was something like $5 a book. It was an awesome way to upgrade your library. They can't have even lost money if people were just claiming to own books to get the cheap price. Their marginal cost for the PDFs was effectively zero so at $5 they were making plenty of money on them. At the time a PDF only copy of their books was about $10.
- YellowZeeZee 11mo agoI had the option to get a membership that I could expense through my work, but decided against it after the trial period ended. The reason was entirely the terrible state of their app. - Random crashes, or times when it would not start up at all. - Text to speech is unusable because it cannot start reading at a specific point. Only at the beginning. - Cannot download epub to use with a different (better) epub reader. So even though it would not cost me anything, I realized I would never use it due to the issues with their app.
- roadside_picnic 11mo ago> Unfortunately, I cannot read technical books fast and definitely not fast enough to make the subscription be worth $500 per year. For me I find the $500 to be a pretty clear win as far as value goes. My shelves are already overflowing with, while not "timeless", much slower aging technical books. But quite often, throughout a year, I'll want a deeper dive into a current topic than I can get from online resources + Claude. Quite often that dive involves wanting to look through multiple books (even if only using a few chapters). I know I'm a dying breed, but, while I love AI for interactive exploration and learning, I find books more valuable in the era of endless YouTube tutorials and AI slop blog posts. Technical topics benefit from "big picture" thinking that basically doesn't exist in modern short-form web content.
- j45 11mo agoBooks still activate a different part of the brain than reading on a screen, including e-ink, so it's not you or a dying breed, people may turn out to not learn as deeply or as quickly.
- dceddia 11mo agoI had kinda suspected this just based on my own experience of paper vs screen, but hadn’t run across any research. After seeing your comment I went looking! I found this interesting: https://phys.org/news/2024-02-screens-paper-effective-absorb-retain.html https://phys.org/news/2024-02-screens-paper-effective-absorb...
- j45 11mo agoThat was one of the studies that I saw too. There's some others about learning more from writing with pen on paper compared to tablet or taking notes digitally typing. I am a digital note taker at heart but can't deny using a notebook still has better outcomes sometimes.
- dboreham 11mo agoProbably true but I'm not going to lug 10 textbooks onto a plane.
- jayfx 11mo agoI've concluded exactly the same! It's far more cost effective to buy individual books than paying for the subscription. Hard copies can also be sold if I decide not to keep them, which offsets costs even more
- mixmastamyk 11mo agoI used to sell things on amzn back in the day. Despite that good karma, one is required now to submit to a body cavity search to sell.
- xbar 11mo agoThe app is unusable. I have a subscription available to me. I try to use it from time to time. The app is unusable.
- elzbardico 11mo agoYou can use the web.
- 123sereusername 11mo ago[dead]
- richard_todd 11mo agoLately I just ask an LLM to teach me things interactively. It will be interesting to see if that stops working so well, when authors stop writing books for LLMs to absorb. Maybe as long as there is some kind of canonical reference, the LLM can bridge the gap to decent educational material. If so, that's kind of sad, but also kind of awesome at the same time. It's definitely an interesting time to be alive. I wish I was just a little closer to retirement, though...
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- asdefghyk 11mo agoI got offered a initial O'Reilly subscription of $200 / year - just last week ....
- JackAcid 11mo ago$500/year?? Wow, I get it free as a military veteran. I still use it via browser at work quite often.
- poorblish 11mo agoI work for a publishing company that sells elearning access to the proprietary “framework”. Anyways our company is now going full bore on AI related content. Everyone is just milling about having meetings about our AI product line but the company is sinking. We don’t focus any effort on our core services and product, just chase the next fad. If other publishing companies are anything like the one I work for then they’re clawing at the wall looking for the next big thing. Since AI is a big question mark, they are publishing absolute drivel.
- stonecharioteer 11mo agoManning wins points for giving me DRM free books and for their website. It's really nice and I like reading the books on it. So much so that I wish I could sync pdfs to the Web progress. Good job Manning! I hate the UX of O'reilly. Great books, but horrible HX. That company seems to have people who do not dogfood.
- sunng 11mo agoI just terminated my 8-years O'Reilly subscription this year. I was at $400/year and realized I cannot make full use of it recently. But I just joined Manning subscription this winter to see if it helps.
- nottorp 11mo ago> where I can get O’Reilly books without DRM and keep them beyond any subscription limit ... and this way they'll own the books ...
- schainks 11mo agoO'Reilly's mobile app is always a moment of zen: You open it to read a book to enhance your professional skills, but alas, the app is obviously poorly written despite being created by people in your profession (who seem to have not read the books?) Anyway, the web experience has been pretty good for a while, so I use that now.
- hnt2025 11mo ago(From my experience) O'reilly is very responsive and open to direct feedback less to rants on the net, I think you should use their contact channels and send feedback :-)
- kunley 11mo agoDisrupt the subscriptions hoax. Buy the books! Even better: physical, paper books. They are a pleasure to read
- never_inline 11mo agoIn my country, it's cost-prohibitive to buy technical books (except the most popular ones like DDIA / JCIP).
- lucaspottersky 11mo agotheir UX is terrible. any decent PDF reader beats it. no more for me as well.
- apwheele 11mo agoDo folks have opinions on the quality of the recent books? Last one I picked up was not good (good chance it is partially AI slop). Read online (and not in the app), but the copy-editing did not do it any favors, and then how code snippets were formed broke the simple copy/paste (used icons for line breaks that could have been avoidable).
- flexagoon 11mo agoI'm genuinely baffled by the amount of people here who actually use those proprietary DRM book apps. I understand paying for the subscription to support the authors/publisher, but surely you can just pay for a subscription and then still download the books as DRM-free pdfs/epubs? Is there a single reason to use those publisher apps?
- tracker1 11mo agoWhen I was consuming close to a book a month, I thought it was pretty well worth it.. it's hard to justify otherwise. Before Amazon got big, I would browser B&N/Borders etc. for technical books and it was nice... even after Amazon, I remember driving across town for a book that I kind of needed before the weekend for a project. Amazon then became my main go-to... then more blog articles and technical posts became prevalent... StackOverflow grew to similar dominance. Now, I buy a handful of books for my Kindle a couple times a year and may or may not get through them. I'm more inclined to just read online docs, search or even look at AI results than read through books. I miss dead tree books, but the space and moving them kinda sucks. Not to mention, that even with glasses the text is a bit hard for me now. I'm still an avid tech reader, just more blogs and less books... I used to tear through 500-800 pages on a typical weekend. After 3 decades in this career, I'm a bit more inclined to veg out in front of the TV.
- nullbyte808 11mo agohttps://annas-archive.org https://annas-archive.org