OReilly.com no longer selling books on their site
1As the title says, the technical book publisher O’reilly is no longer doing direct to consumer sales- it’s either use Safari, their books on demand monthly service, or buy them from a partner elsewhere (like Amazon).
Any titles you’ve previously bought will still be there, exactly as they were.
Here’s the blog post on it: https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/were-reinventing-too
- 10 comments, 25 replies
- Comment
The end of an era… that I never partook of.
I suppose it was overdue. Tim O’Reilly has always seemed to have the long view, and has been good at predicting what comes next (which is why he’s still around, and many of his contemporaries are not).
The world has changed a thousand times over since those first X WIndows pamphlets. I used to have one, but it vanished, to my great sorrow, many years ago.
Good luck, Tim.
I read too fast. I thought they were switching to ebooks only. I don’t see any problem with the change, but I do hope they continue to print physical books as different people learn in different formats.
Every time I load this thread, I think about @katylava.
Yeah that’s unfortunate. I only bought the DRM-free ebooks from Oreilly’s shop so I guess I’ll stick with Pragmatic Programmers, Manning, or some of the other small publishers (Leanpub?).
I got a subscription to Safari while it was on sale a while ago. Currently have at least a hundred books queued up to maybe-someday read… seems like an odd decision to me to get rid of first party book sales, while maintaining them elsewhere.
(Replace “odd” with “sinister”.)
I can’t imagine they’re trying to save the effort of maintaining an old catalog… (seems to me that they’d need to do that in any case). So they’re, what, just gradually increasing the force pushing people toward a subscription model?
An ever-larger part of me wants to go back to cash, back to cables for networking, back to media being embodied in physical objects that followed physical object rules… this new world has a lot of problems that double as good business.
@InnocuousFarmer Have you been watching Halt And Catch Fire? It’s pretty true to life, complete with cables and erasable disks. It starts in Texas and moves to Silicon Valley… dramatizes the personal computing boom…
http://www.amc.com/shows/halt-and-catch-fire
@OldCatLady Ah, the best op code!
I meant to watch that, but forgot about it. Thanks for reminding me
@InnocuousFarmer The final season starts 19 August.
I don’t have anything to add because the article covers everything I know about it. But for those that love books and didn’t read the article, this is the important bit:
The best thing about O’Reilly (there are many good things for those of us ignorant to much of the tech field) is that they use cute animals on the cover. Case in point:
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920057741.do
@woodhouse Adorable animals!
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920049517.do
@InnocuousFarmer @Thumperchick
Llama or alpaca?
@PlacidPenguin it is “the llama book”. Might be an alpaca then, I guess.
@InnocuousFarmer
Could also be a camel in disguise.
@woodhouse I like it when they come together and form wonderful new animals…
@brhfl what is that, a Fishocerus? A pointy lizard?
@InnocuousFarmer Close! Birdocerus.
And, to be precise, it’s a rufous-necked weaverocerus, according to the copyright page.
New post about this from Laura Baldwin: https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/the-mission-of-spreading-the-knowledge-of-innovators-continues
@katylava The TL;DR seems to be that O’Reilly is closing their online store (but not their publishing business) because they want to save money by not running an e-commerce site… really?
@InnocuousFarmer What’s wrong with that? Not many people think to buy books directly from the publisher anyway.
@katylava it’s hard for me to believe that portion of the business costs… well, anything, relatively speaking. It’s not like they don’t have all the costs associated with serving the same media through Safari (first party), including support and payment processing. I’m not exactly incredulous… but I don’t quite buy it, either.
@InnocuousFarmer Uh, no, they are completely different beasts.
@katylava if you feel up to it, mind explaining? I know they’re not identical services, but I’m experiencing a failure of imagination.
@InnocuousFarmer I’ll try, but being relatively new at O’Reilly, I only know a little.
Basically Safari and O’Reilly were different companies until recently, with whole separate systems for… everything really. The systems can communicate with each other through a few APIs, but O’Reilly acts as a publisher with content in Safari (there are other publishers with content on Safari as well).
The big goal for this year though is unification. It’s my understanding that including an online book shop is not worth bringing into the unification efforts (which are enormous) because it’s pointless to use engineering and marketing efforts on something that is only going to become less and less valuable – as evidenced by the decline in sales in our own shop, which we only expect to continue.
Additionally, it should be of no great loss to our customers, since they can and do still buy our books from other retailers. Personally I don’t get why anyone is upset. I never bought an O’Reilly book from the site, and I never even thought to do so. I used to buy them in brick-and-mortar book shops, then later on Amazon.
@katylava From what I can tell online, folks are rather disappointed at the loss of a major multi-format DRM-free technical book publisher. There are certainly other technical book publishers, but O’Reilly was probably the biggest- in mindshare if not marketshare.
@dashcloud I did see that mentioned in Laura’s post. I was under the impression from that post that you can still get DRM-free versions though. Maybe not multi-format?
@katylava Oh!
I’ve done work on integration of business systems. That makes tons of sense. I am sure I’m speaking only for myself, but that bit of information --integration not having already happened – changes the entire framing of this story in my mind. It doesn’t really matter, but I feel better about it, so, thanks.
Regarding your comment on why people are bent out of shape, I think, for people like me, the strong trend in recent years seems toward video-based media, subscription-based business models, generally cynical lock-in efforts, and ever-increasing surveillance… not sure I’ve listed all of the things that bother me, but those are at least some highlights. It’s a real race to the bottom, out there.
Inside that worldview, it’s hard to avoid reacting viscerally to every new piece of news that seems to be another step in that direction, especially when it’s coming from a company that one does not already detest. (I’m a bit of a fan of O’Reilly.)
It’s less (at least for me) about availability of books today, and more about implications for what the world is going to be like ten years from now.
I read the post from Laura Baldwin, and I think that I should point out that there is still at least one small publisher with the same philosophy as Tim (still owns the company, which is private, and values the authors), who is still selling books from the site. It’s No Starch Press.
https://www.nostarch.com/
(https://www.nostarch.com/about)
Bill’s a great guy, and you can still get books directly from the site (or from the mother ship, if you must). I love books, and I have a bunch of books from O’Reilly and from No Starch.
Well, really, I just have a lot of books. I like books. It’s people I don’t like. :-}
@Shrdlu Bill is a great guy- I’ve met him several times at HOPE.
Did you pre-order a copy of PoC||GTFO? It seems like the kind of thing you’d like a lot (you can read them online if you’d like to get a feel for the material).
@dashcloud You need to spell out the title; it’s unlikely that I will have pre-ordered a book, having left the technical world years ago (a year or two after I retired). It was gradual, but I just noticed a few years after I’d retired that there wasn’t any motivation to stay up to date, and I haven’t.
Bill is a good human, and those seem so rare. I’ve never seen him do a mean thing, or even raise his voice to someone. I had no idea HOPE was even still a thing; I’m a West Coast kind of girl. I also have an intense dislike of crowds, which is another reason to not go to HOPE (or its kindred).
Never mind, I just went to the site, and there it is. No, not something that would attract me. Please note that I predate even Phrack (lord, lord, lord, but I’m old. OLD). No worries. XXOO
@Shrdlu your name looks very familiar for some reason. Would I know you from someplace? Just curious.
@InnocuousFarmer
-Wikipedia
Wikipedia goes on to say it’s a precursor to interactive fiction. I do recall Montfort mentioning it in Twisty Little Passages (which is referenced at Wikipedia)
@stinks @InnocuousFarmer It’s also the second column of keys on your keyboard.
(Assuming you’re a Linotype operator).