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Comment by foobar_42 | Hacker News Reader

Isn't a bit distasteful to use the occasion of someone's death to sell books?

If this prompts more people to discover Ritchie's work then I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing.

Especially that the offer does not seem particularly good since they are only ebooks and seem overpriced in the first place. The physical books are already cheaper on Amazon and kindle versions cheaper still.

Edit: Just had a thought that any profit on these sales should really go to a charity or foundation.

Little know trick (I don't use it) that O'reilly himself probably frowns upon but doesn't discourage is that if you regitster a physical book with the ISBN you can get the ebook for 5 bucks. You only need the ISBN for this. O'Reilly has said many times he prefers that as many people as possible read the books. And hopefully enough will pay for them to make them viable. (Please correct me if I'm wrong on his belief about this).

I remember O'Reilly himself saying that the pricing on Ebooks was currently an experiment and they are trying to figure out what is best. That's why, in my opinion, they do eboook deals every day.

Would you mind giving more details on where one could register the ISBN, do you have a link ?

https://members.oreilly.com/account/register/index

You need to register a Oreilly.com account. Once you do that you should be able under Your Products and then Print Books to upgrade them to Ebooks for 4.99.

It's a crazy good deal. I've also seen people just buy the book off the Android app store and export the epub out of the app. I think the Adiko book app will do that for you.

I love O'Reilly's books. I discovered the $5 ebook upgrade, and plowed through registering and upgrading all 30-off books that I've accumulated over the past 20 years. Then I bought a few since then on their daily deal.

But the real kicker was I suddenly had a coupon code that lasted for about 2 weeks that was for $5 for any new ebook. I blew about $200 that pay period, so now I've got enough reading material for half a life-time.

I so wish Amazon would loosen up on their Kindle DRM. I've only purchased a few titled, and my Kindle is pretty much am O'reilly Reader these days.

I really wish the cost of the ebooks was in the $5 range for most titles (O'Reilly or not). At that price, I'd purchase so many tech books on impulse, I'd probably never get around to reading most of them, but rather to have them for reference.

Manning has a 45% sale off everything, if you use code "halloweekend45". They sell Clojure, Erlang and other books. We can pretend it's a McCarthy Day celebration. :)

> Edit: Just had a thought that any profit on these sales should really go to a charity or foundation.

They're eBooks so the margins are pretty high.

I think it would have been nice if they'd offered a deep discount on paper books on this occasion.

O'Reilly's ebooks are DRM-free. Kindle version is not.

You can easily remove the Kindle DRM using Calibre and some plugins.

I choose not to reward publishers of DRMed works with my money. If some of the open-format stuff is too pricey, well, there's plenty to read off in the free world anyway.

Not necessarily, and not in this case.

Hucksters are opportunists.

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