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Comment by giantrobot | Hacker News Reader

The moment O'Reilly went subscription-only they lost me as a customer. I have a huge library of O'Reilly books I've purchased as PDFs. Shit I've got a huge library of print O'Reilly books despite years of slimming down.

It really sucked because I've been learning from O'Reilly books for thirty years. But I've become fundamentally opposed to DRM on media and subscription-only access is the ultimate DRM. I don't have any desire to be locked into their app to access stuff I paid for and be at the whims of their poor UI decisions.

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They do still sell all of their books - just not directly on their website.

Whenever possible, they're sold without DRM.

Which is fine but they ruined their direct DRM-free sales. You used to get access to a PDF, epub, and mobi version of a book with no DRM. They even conveniently allowed you to sync your purchases to Dropbox. It was awesome.

Now you have to hope something g you're interested in ends up in a Humble Bundle or something. The situation is worse in every way for a end users.

It would be such a dream if I could get an ebook, pdf, and physical copy. I love O'Reilly books and have been lucky to have access the last few years because of school.

They used to do a "digital upgrade" where you could get the digital version of a book if you had the physical copy. There was no verification on their end and it was something like $5 a book. It was an awesome way to upgrade your library.

They can't have even lost money if people were just claiming to own books to get the cheap price. Their marginal cost for the PDFs was effectively zero so at $5 they were making plenty of money on them. At the time a PDF only copy of their books was about $10.

Yeah me too. The only recent O'Reilly books I have came from humblebundle specials.

I've also been pretty disappointed with their quality and/or usefulness lately. They seem to just cover stuff in a less technical vague high level way now. Hopefully that's just a sampling error on my part.

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