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Comment by manaskarekar | Hacker News Reader

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manaskarekar

This really sucks.

It was my favorite place to buy books. It seemed like the one place that had the model closest to being right.

- They used to have an ongoing discount of 45% and more on special holidays.

- They were DRM free in multiple formats and they gave you discounts on ebooks if you had purchased the print books.

- They had regular updates to ebooks posted in one single list that you could keep up with.

I wish I had purchased all the books on my wish-list before this was announced.

The Safari subscription model makes no sense to my use-case.

I guess that makes Informit.com and No Starch Press my goto book stores. Also Manning and Apress, but their selection is weaker.

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I completely agree. I buy a handful of books every year directly from O’Reilly, due to the reasons listed above. I don’t buy $399/year, and even if I did last year, I definitely couldn’t predict that with certainty next year, so I’m definitely not going to subscribe. Bummer.

Packt is also worth considering, with a similar lack of DRM and multiple formats.

As a nice bonus, every day, they make one title available free - a good means to dip into new technologies just out of curiosity:

https://www.packtpub.com/packt/offers/free-learning

Packt is very hit or miss. Some titles are awesome, and others read like a collection of SO answers and out-of-date official documentation.

Yes, I have bought books from them in the past. Thanks.

I like NoStarchPress, but Manning has waaaay more books.

Good books take time. We're not in a rush to make lots of them.

I agree. I own fantastic books from both NoStarch and Manning and a few from O'Reilly to name a few publishers (I really like tech books). I check NoStarch about once a month to see if there is something new on the horizon and unfortunately there's usually not a huge amount. Manning's MEAP program usually has 25+ books in the works and there are at least 5 I'm waiting on. Tldr; I wish NoStarch published more of their great books.

Thank you for nostarchpress.

Also thank you for the humble bundle, please keep them coming!

And many more to come! We're always on the hunt for new tech to teach in our books (and now videos)

No Starch are great too though. I own a few myself :)

Calibre will enable you to remove DRM. It is both handy and quick.

Which is totally illegal by the way.(I think due to DMCA)

The DMCA is an american law. Last time I looked, I don't live in america.

Per the wise words of a certain German musical group: we're all living in America.

Per the wise words of a certain british poet and philosopher "You can't always get what you waaaaant."

Effectively does not matter if you aren't distributing. Format shifting shouldn't be illegal, regardless.

>Effectively does not matter if you aren't distributing. While publishers don't usually go after end users, they do very often go after the people who make and/or distribute the tools. So, just because you can remove the DRM today doesn't mean you will be able to tomorrow. And it usually means you're downloading and running software on your PC by someone who is not deterred much by something being illegal.

Removing DRM is no longer so easy, now that Amazon moved their titles to the KFX format. Last I checked, the only way to do this was a clunky workaround involving either not updating your desktop Kindle software past a certain version, or downloading directly from your account page. The latter option is unavailable if you don't own a Paperwhite.

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