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Comment by tinalumfoil | Hacker News Reader

Wonder if this is related to,

> As of July 1, 2022, you will no longer have to access the O’Reilly Learning platform as a benefit of your ACM membership. Despite our best efforts, O’Reilly Media is unwilling to continue to license their content to ACM for members.

The O'Reilly library is great and justified the prices of an ACM membership, but I don't think journal access and my monthly copy of Communications will be enough to keep me come renewal.

Unless, of course, they find something equally valuable to replace the O'Reilly catalog with.

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That's a shame. I don't think I got that email yet; do you have the subject line?

I actually joined ACM because O'Reilly did some sketchy stuff with my Safari membership a couple years ago. They sent me an email with an offer to upgrade from Safari to "O'Reilly online learning" with a discount for the first year, and the links were all going to genuine domains. But whenever I tried to actually do it, there was no way for me to see/do the offer on their site, despite being within the offer window. I wrote to confirm I wanted to use the discount, and asked for help, and they just wrote back and said "send us the email."

So instead, I used all my download tokens (which also broke and required contacting support), canceled, and got an ACM membership for much cheaper. (Which I would have done anyway had I had a reason to seek it out.) Oh well. There is enough web content today that I don't think it matters that much.

Yes, I got email , I think yesterday. O'Reilly was really useful platform for learning. It seems they couldn't renegotiate it for ACM users. To be honest I could have paid more to have O'reilly access.

> do you have the subject line?

The email I received had subject line: Notice Regarding Your Access to O'Reilly Content

$100 for a ACM membership $500 for O'Reilly. I can see why O'Reilly didn't want to renew. Learning materials are pretty slim with O'Reilly removed.

TBH I don't know what O'Reilly is thinking with that price point. I wish they had a "lite" version with just book access or something, because honestly that's all I ever use.

ACM used to have full access to the O'Reilly online catalog e.g. "live training", and other things. I don't remember exactly when but we got a scaled down version of it, limited to books and video.

I dont see myself supporting OReilly at that price especially when they run at least once a year a 50% discount (black friday).

ACM offers other sources for books, not as complete catalogue but skillsoft has Manning Publications and No Starch Press, so from IT point of view, already great. I might miss the conference and some books there and there, but what is available is already great. Libgen/youtube and the like will cover the remaining.

You are right of course. Maybe a narrower selection would work, instead of zero access now.

Why would it be related? Losing the O’Reilly platform makes your ACM membership less valuable. I don’t see this making it more valuable.

If anything, it makes it less valuable, as subscribing won’t gain you access to papers published before 2000 anymore (you’ll still have it, but you also will have it is you aren’t an ACM member)

I didn't realize these articles were already available for me. You're right then that this doesn't exactly add value to an ACM membership. But maybe this is to make room to expand the ACM Digital Library in other ways.

Well, shit. I really loved that benefit. I might have to see if my employer will pay for a membership.

Now I have to figure out if there's a way to save all my playlists and notes. Guess I didn't think about the potential downsides of storing all those in a system I don't own.

Oh well... O'Reilly themselves have been losing publishers, a lot of their books (especially containing math) are formatted like crap, their tagging is terrible. Hopefully ACM can make some direct deal with major publishers like MIT Press and Manning.

I will quit ACM, this is the only perk that mattered.

The unlimited access to the digital library is nice, even though you need to pay extra. I don't think for example IEEE offers a similar benefit.

Downvoters: fine downvote me, but can you also name a perk that matters?

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