O'Reilly is selling any eBook for $9.99 today | Hacker News Reader

O'Reilly is selling any eBook for $9.99 today

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78 pointsbrandon77 comments

You can get $5 O'Reilly EPUBs from the App Store everyday.

Extracting an epub from an iPhone app is easy. First you unzip the .ipa file. Then you cd to Payload/*/book. Finally, you zip up the files to an .epub file: zip -X ~/book.epub mimetype && zip -r9DX ~/book.epub META-INF OEBPS.

mimetype must be first in the archive for validity, which you can test with EpubCheck.

Interesting. I just checked on the Android Google Market and found several of the books I was considering were just $5.

They are in multi-file HTML format inside the APK, so this is even cheaper and given I wanted them on the Android phone/tablet anyway, easier.

Even better the eBook app O'Reilly delivers has an "Export to ePub" button that will send it to an ePub on your sdcard.

This is definitely a hacky way to go. I just tried it with Matz’s Ruby book. Reading it with Stanza on OSX is just about the ugliest digital reading experience outside of scanned text.

Oh well, it only set me back 5 bucks.

It's an issue of using a subpar client, not a subpar format. I have yet to find a decent epub reader for a computer. Stanza for iPhone, iBooks, and dedicated hardware render epubs beautifully.

Exciting headline; miserable experience.

We're sorry, an error has occurred in our application.

So now I've finally given up after the tenth attempt. I guess O'Reilly won't be selling me that copy of Building Scalable Websites after all.

My order went through, but I can't access my book :(

Same here, when I go to the "emedia" page, it sits there loading for a good 3 minutes, then says I don't have anything to download.

Appears to be a common trend, same situation here for iPhone 3D I just got and was excited to 'download immediately' but I get 'no data' or no books to download.

I called them and the rep said it's b/c of the load. She assured me that it will show up eventually.

Kinda figured this would be the case, was planning on waiting until tomorrow to bug them. Glad to hear someone already got it confirmed though.

It's midnight CST, and I finally saw one of my five books purchased ("Head First Design Patterns") show up. Hopefully the rest will follow...

I called up their customer service and they mentioned that it's not showing up because the servers are under heavy load. The lady on the other end of their customer service line was really nice and I have no doubt the ebook will show up in ours accounts eventually.

If I had an iPad I might consider it to see if I can read on that, but I've found that I only ever read books when printed on the pulped, mangled, processed bodies of brutally murdered trees.

Especially for technical books where I end up flipping around pages back and forth something that the computer probably will never be able to model intuitively.

Though I must say I like my kindle enough that it is readable for normal books.

But there is just something about paper :)

Yes, if only such technology existed where you could swap between two bookmarks with a keypress. Or where you could jump to a particular page by just typing in a number.

There are some distinct and useful qualities to the older, physical media.

[Disclosure: The below is an old HN post I made.]

The Social Life of Paper (2002) (newyorker.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=434516

P.S. I also subscribe to Safari. It's nice not to lug a bunch of books around, but the reading experience I do find different between the two media.

From what I've seen, O'Reilly material works well on iPad. I have a subscription to Safari Library, and have tried using it three ways on my iPad.

1. For those books that support the HTML view, I've read them in the browser from the Safari Library web site. These have been excellent, including diagrams and code snippets. One or two books have had slight formatting problems (a line of example code not wrapping).

2. For books that don't support the HTML view, or books that I've downloaded as PDFs (part of the my subscription is a certain number of "download tokens" that can be redeemed to download chapters or whole books), I've read then in GoodReader. This has worked out fine.

3. Finally, they offer some books for download in EPub format. I've tried those in iBooks, and they've been good. I've also used the free program Calibre to convert some of the PDFs I downloaded to EPub and they have worked fine.

I am quite pleased with the combination of O'Reilly Safari Library and my iPad.

Oh, they've also announced that this summer there will be a Safari Library iPad application. That should be interesting.

Why would an iPad help? It still has the eyeball-melting backlight, and it has a glossy screen, so you have to read through a reflection.

There's a reason why people like e-ink-based ebook readers so much. They may not have games, but they are really good for reading ebooks. (Though I admit that the normal Kindle is not so great for books that have diagrams.)

I have a Kindle DX. Love it for reading research PDFs from start to finish.

I had also figured it would be fantastic to shrink the shelf space for tech books, and always have those books at hand. Big downside that doesn't hit you till you try to use it for this purpose: the e-ink can't page flip fast enough to be useful.

Readers on the iPad (iBooks, even Kindle app) don't have this issue.

I'm not sure I follow. But what I have learned from reading HN is that I am probably the only person in the world that reads each page of a book in order. I start with the first page. When I'm done reading that page, I read the second page. Induct on n.

This might be my favorite comment of yours.

I usually trip up on the "induct on n" part. Fortunately, I start enough books that I still finish a few each year.

    I usually trip up on the "induct on n" part.

I sometimes get "out of memory" errors; restarting sometimes help.

I read all books in order as well.

I prefer e-readers (Sony Reader, Kindle DX, iPad) because I read at the speed of about one airport novel per hour, meaning I need five books for a cross country flight. It's easier to carry these electronically, and I keep a backlog of 50 - 70 books available to read.

For computer books, such as the jQuery Cookbook I purchased yesterday from O'Reilly in this sale, I will also read each one from cover to cover. With that reading I form a visual spatial memory of where in the book I can find any information I need.

My memory is not eidetic. I can't read the actual words, and I don't remember every page number. But I do know about how deep in the book, left or right page, and where on the page to look, so I can usually find a needed reference within a half dozen page turns.

With e-readers, this is fuzzier. The "where in the book" depends on the progress bar, and there's no left or right to halve the search, so takes at least 10 - 20 page turns instead. These page turns are SLOOOOOW.

On the iPad, page turns are many times faster. So, finding reference material in a thick reference book that I cognitively mapped on the iPad is commensurately faster.

I have read more than 3000 screens (pages?) on my iPad so far and my eyeballs have not melted yet. I think it is quite a personal thing whether you like using an iPad for reading a lot of material or not.

I find it a lot easier on my eyes than my Macbook Air, for reading, not sure why. But there it is.

I find it a lot easier on my eyes than my Macbook Air, for reading, not sure why. But there it is.

Could it be because you spent $500 on it for the purpose of reading books, and your mind won't let you think negative thoughts about the experience?

I had a pair of pants like this. They were the wrong size, uncomfortable, and ugly. But I wore them anyway because it was too late to return them, and I spent $75 on them that I could never get back. So I just learned to like them, even though they were fundamentally flawed.

No. I am certain that isn't it. As I did get it for free. I don't really think the iPad is the Jesus tablet, but I certainly would spend $500 on another one if I lost this one, to read books on it.

Goodreader (plus a couple other pdf apps) can darken the screen so it's almost like glossy paper

http://i.imgur.com/h5NEi.jpg

In general I agree, but pocket-reference e-books on your mobile shouldn't be scoffed at.

Exactly. If you're an on-the-move consultant who works with a bunch of different technologies, the last thing you want is more stuff to carry.

For anyone else trying to find this out and finding the site to be amazingly slow:

Use coupon code FAVFA - prices won't be discounted until check-out.

It works for multiple books, although the headline looks like it's for a single book.

> it works for multiple books

FYI: Looks like ordering multiple books created issues getting delivery of yesterday's purchases. I also lost the discount after checkout. Today's order pricing isn't what was reflected at checkout.

Today the two titles I bought in two orders are listed as "registered" under the registered books area.

Order status on both orders reflects "BOOKED", but shipped is 0, download link is not active, and the books are not listed in the downloads section.

One purchase shows the discount, the other reflects full price without discount.

An email to O'Reilly auto-responded with this:

> Thank you for contacting O'Reilly Media Customer Service. We are experiencing a very heavy volume of orders due to our recent promotion. This is affecting the delivery and access of your electronic media. Please be patient and keep checking your account.

TL;DR: Buyers should double-check orders to see what was actually charged.

O'Reilly is catching up, and fixing order discounts too:

_____________________

I apologize for the delay in getting back to you. I checked your account and you now have access. You can download your ebook here:

https://members.oreilly.com/account/emedia

There were issues with our servers on Friday due to high loads, and we've been working to make sure everyone received the content they purchased.

We have refunded you the amount that you would have saved if the discount code was applied to one of your orders. Please allow 5-7 business days for the credit to appear on your statement.

Thank you again for your orders and for your understanding. Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance.

Best Regards, O'Reilly Media Customer Service

_____________________

Thanks, O'Reilly.

I think there are some valuable lessons to be learned by this sale for O'Reilly, tech publishers and authors.

* 9.99 standard pricing will result in incredibly high sales volumes (the servers would not nearly have been overloaded if everyone wasn't clamoring to get their purchases in before the deadline)

* Publishers and authors need to decide whether they want larger margins w/low volumes - I am of the understanding that selling 5k copies is considered a best seller in the tech market - instead of lower margins with higher volumes. I'm hoping that the results of yesterday's sale might make them consider the first point above.

It would be interesting to see if O'Reilly released some statistics on book sales in the wake of yesterday's server bloodbath.

Myself, I bought a pile of books that I otherwise would not have bought. I have an O'Reilly Safari subscription that is already saving me tons of money, and the low price just pushed me over the edge to buy some local copies of books that I might have otherwise just had in my bookshelf for a month.

Can anyone make any recommendations?

"Programming Collective Intelligence" by Toby Segaran.

Great recommendation. I personally enjoyed that book tremendously.

Thanks! I appreciate the support!

Thanks for writing such a great book. One of the treasures in my (ever growing) collection and I am even citing it in one of my papers I currently write :)

Thanks for the fantastic book. :-)

I just got a copy of this, meaning to read this for a long time.

Here's a few recent buys:

  - Javascript: The Good Parts (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748/)
  - High Performance Javascript (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596802806/)

It's always a good time to buy a few classics:

  - Information Architecture for the WWW (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596527341/)
  - Javascript: The definitive guide (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596101992/)
  - Beautiful Code (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510046/)

> Javascript: The definitive guide

I'm waiting for the 6th edition:

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596805531

You get free updates on eBooks, eh

Do you get free updates across editions? Seems unlikely to me.

You get 50% off future ebook editions.

I'm buying 'R in a Nutshell' and 'The Art of Debugging with GDB and DDD'.

Their server seems to be swamped. There's nothing like a unresponsive server to sober you up from a whimsical book purchase on a FRiday.

I was trying to buy:

* Making Things Talk (great into to networking with low-level HW)

* The Best of Instructables (excellent selection of mostly simple projects, includes IKEA hacking)

Nice choices.

I guess 70% savings is always enough to get everyone to take down their server.

I'm getting Confessions of a Public Speaker, I was long interested in this book.

97 Things Every Programmer Should Know (ed. Kevlin Henney) is sort of nice reading. All pretty smart ideas so far, imho. Though I haven't finished reading it.

(Like a lot of O'Reilly books these days, it's available in a free (legal) form on the internet too http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Contri... )

I grabbed Hadoop: The Definitive Guide Tomcat: The definitive Guide 2nd ed (this one I have access to via ACM membership but those rotate out potentially so eh) Head first Statistics (my math skills are beyond rusty, and the head first books tend to be good.

However either due to overload or something, while I was able to place my order, the books are not showing up in my available list yet. Figure I'll give them until tomorrow then throw an email at them asking what's wrong.

Yep, same here. My order went through but the books haven't showed up yet.

My book 'Programming Windows Azure' just came out today. :) I feel bad about plugging it here but hey, I put heart & soul into it for the last one year so I feel justified :).

Obligatory O'Reilly and Amazon links

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596801984 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596801971

If it helps, I need to point out that my book is chock-full of Star Trek, BSG and Monty Python references and the surprising backstory of how Windows Azure's orginal code name came to be. :)

This caught my eye... And then I remembered that my safaribooksonline subscription lets me read all the o'reilly books I want, and thousands of other tech books, for $20.00 a month.

For anyone who wants to use this coupon, I'm not sure why you wouldn't just get yourself a month on safari... or a free trial for that matter.... Any ideas?

Reading offline, like on my ipad

Their website says $42.99/month for new subscriptions!

Strangely this promotion led me to pick up the "MEAP" edition of Clojure in Action from Manning Publications. I already had The Joy of Clojure and I wanted to see the other side.

I can't think of anything O'Reilly offers that I want to read right now aside from maybe Agile Web Development with Rails.

Free to Choose ebook deal of the day

Oddly, "Free to Choose" (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Free_to_Choos... ) is not one of the books that you can buy.

Seems like this is a popular promotion, based on their website performance. I wonder if it will make anyone reconsider the recent controversy over Amazon's pricing for Kindle editions. Seems like lots of people are willing to buy e-books for $9.99.

Yeah at $9.99 it's worth picking up things for a look. At $30-$40 you want to be sure you'll have the time to read it and it's something useful/ interesting.

Exactly. Plus, $30-$40 for an ebook doesn't seem fair to me.

Before ebook prices started coming down, I had stopped buying tech books because they're very expensive and become obsolete in a few months.

These are technical books that retail for $30-$60; so $9 is a great price.

Amazon is charging $12-$13 for some novels that sell in hardback for $15, and $6.99 for some novels that are $7.99 in paperback. That's not such a great deal.

5/21/2010 — Due to heavy server volume you may experience trouble downloading your ebook orders.

We expect to have the issue resolved soon. Please continue to check back or contact our Customer Service: accounts@oreilly.com

Out of curiosity anyone able to download their books yet? The loading data screen no longer hangs for 20+ seconds, but it still doesn't find the books.

Great suggestions from this thread, thanks all. Wound up getting:

R in a Nutshell, 1Ed

Real World Haskell, 1Ed

iPhone Game Development, 1Ed

Cocoa and Objective-C: Up and Running, 1Ed

JavaScript: The Good Parts, 1Ed

Programming Collective Intelligence, 1Ed

Head First Statistics, 1Ed

Head First Data Analysis, 1Ed

Confessions of a Public Speaker, 1Ed

iPhone 3D Programming, 1Ed

I guess they gave themselves a DDoS...

Hm...Server seems very busy, can't place my order :(

Yeah I got tossed on checkout too. There's a major nerdgasm going on there.

Cool, I've been thinking about getting an eBook version of RWH because I can just never seem to find the time to read it at home.

They should have made it a 2 hour sale or something, I'm up to 6 books and need to stop before I get tempted by something else.

I wonder how many books they sold for smaller languages people are curious about. Haskell, R, Erlang, etc.

I was feeling adventurous and settled on an erlang book.

Anyone know if this includes Rough Cuts?

Microsoft Press titles excluded

I'm fine with that.

I'm not. Lots of companies use C#, Visual Studio, or just Windows in general, and the best books for those topics usually come from MS Press. It would have been nice to get the C# 2010 book through this deal.

http://www.appstorehq.com/microsoft-visualc-2010stepbystep-i...

Is this the one you wanted? You can get this for $6 and use some advice from upthread to convert it to ePub.

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