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Comment by rst | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps best read after the blog post from current O'Reilly media president Laura Baldwin, which makes two important points:

1) Book sales have been consistently declining overall, in all media. It's not clear that DRM has much to do with this.

2) They'll still be selling DRM-free through at least one merchant, Google Play. (It's not clear whether this policy extends to Amazon as well, but they wouldn't be the first publisher selling DRM-free there; Tor's science fiction novels have been DRM-free through all merchants for a few years now.)

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oreilly-mission-spreading-kno...

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But there are no DRM free high quality PDFs ... if you download a PDF from Play Books its a conversion.

Can you given some more details? A screen shot demonstrating the low quality would be nice. Not that I don't what your saying.

Hopefully OReilly wanted only to cut costs, and is still willing to make high quality preorders and DRM free media available through some other source.

Here's a guy who shared a side-by-side comparison of Google and O' Reilly's editions of Designing Data Intensive Applications - https://mobile.twitter.com/kondrej/status/880540236303880193

That seems to be two different screenshots of different parts of the Google version. The typesetting is pretty bad.

We still sell all O'Reilly books DRM free in both PDF and ePUB. i.e. http://www.ebooks.com/95729334/designing-data-intensive-appl.... If you click on preview (on a desktop), the preview is composed of images rendered from the PDF.

Why does that page you linked have a list of supported devices? It looks to me like ebooks.com does use DRM.

You're correct, it should have different info for DRM free books under the supported devices section. We do use DRM at ebooks.com, but only for the publishers that enforce us to use it (99% of publishers).

>DRM-free

>supported on "e-readers with Adobe Digital Editions installed"

Someone is incorrect here.

The second statement is probably boilerplate but is concerning.

Yes, you're right, it's boilerplate and needs to be updated to reflect that O'Reilly books are DRM-free and can be read on any device, I'll get it updated tomorrow.

Looking at the info about the formats for that book it seems that the ePub and PDF are unrestricted.

Thanks for the feedback, the boilerplate template was wrong. We've updated product description pages so they're clearer now (Clearly states DRM free)

I really want to support you, but $42AUD is many times more than it would have cost on oreilly.com.

Actually, that's just two screenshots from the same Google Play version. A side-by-side with O'Reilly's PDF is striking

https://twitter.com/kondrej/status/881120506161876992

"Running oreilly.com as a distribution platform was effective, but also costly. It required a dedicated investment in e-commerce software, staff, marketing, and so on."

Perhaps it was expensive because it was a platform for other publishers (and print) as well, but I doubt this would be true if they focused on their own selection of eBooks.

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