OReilly offers 50% discount on ebooks in celebration of 'Day Against DRM' | Hacker News Reader

OReilly offers 50% discount on ebooks in celebration of 'Day Against DRM'

shop.oreilly.com

179 pointsdenzil_correa58 comments

Offering books without DRM is awesome, but as consumers should also have the right to remove DRM to use works in non-copyright infringing ways. For example, commentary, academic use, parody, criticism, and making backup copies.

At the moment, circumventing DRM for non-infringing reasons is illegal. Which is why Section 1201 of the DMCA needs to be fixed. Join the movement:

http://fixthedmca.org

I signed the petition and told my friends about it. Fixing the DMCA is key.

Not sure how widely this is know but you can use Safari Books Online [1] for a monthly fee (about the price of a typical book) and just read them on-line. I generally read the book and use them as referenced in real life and this translates perfectly to an on-line media. Also, there is no waiting for the books to show up!!

p.s. my office also has a corporate account with books24x7 [2], but thier on-line format is not as good as Safari's.

[1] http://www.safaribooksonline.com/

[2] http://books24x7.com/

If you're a student, its likely that your University library has purchased this on your behalf. Mine has, and I get all oreilly books online, free :)

Thanks, I had no idea I had access to these books until now.

And public libraries. For example, if you live in the Houston area, the Harris County Public Library has several licenses to Safari. (hcpl.net) I sure wish O'Reilly had an affiliate program. I would collect the name of every public library system that offered Safari, SEO the name of O'Reilly books, and direct people to their local library's license of Safari with a helpful affiliate ad to buy their own copy. Note: the public library version of Safari is not quite the same as a personal (or corporate?) license, but it is very similar.

Slightly off-topic observation:

2 results for: django > Books

46 results for: rails > Books

Can anyone speak to the demand, or lack thereof, for Django books and educational material? Do large(r) technical publishers not see a viable market for Django books?

I read Two Scoops Of Django (on vacation, no less) and would love to see more books on Django best practices.

Yes, this is interesting.

When I learned Django, the existing books were, how can I put it, awful. Really

Sorry, but the ones that were "recommended" to me had no sense of a learning curve whatsoever. I was left frustrated by them, thinking I would never learn this.

And beyond the Django tutorial on the site, you're left all by yourself.

2SoD is good, but it's a book for advanced users.

It is really a sad situation.

To be fair, Django has excellent documentation and a great online community of bloggers and people to poke with questions. I've rarely come to a situation where I was truly off on my own. Although, yeah, I would love to see more Django books out there.

Yes, the documentation is very good, what confuses people is what to look up (if you don't know where to look) or in what order to learn things.

Perform a job search for the same two topics.

I wonder if this has to deal with some external factors, like availability of a good free book (often times from the makers), or volatility of APIs.

Having said that, for a long time I have been evaluating popularity, risk of adoption, and job market impact of technologies using the number of O'Reilly books and videos published on the subject as a crude measure.

> I wonder if this has to deal with some external factors, like availability of a good free book

The Django documentation is absolutely fantastic[1]. It and PostgreSQL are my personal gold standards for documentation.

[1] At least from my experience playing with it. I have not tried to use Django in anger, but it feels like the docs will hold up well.

My only criticism of the Django docs is that every sentence has equal weight. That makes it difficult for someone starting out to distinguish between things that are absolutely critical and those that just nice to know. However once you are up and running they are great but they do need re-reading for the same reason.

They definitely don't have any Django books, but the Rails count is a little exaggerated there. e-books and print are listed as separate entries, there are a lot of "mini" e-books, and some of the Rails books are from 2007 and are surely pretty useless now.

says more about overproduction of Rails books then it does about lack of Django...

I just got 'Test-driven web development with Python" from this sale. Django feels awesome! Got 'Two Scoops", too =P

FYI, ebooks are always 50% off at O'Reilly...at least for the past few years that I've been buying from them.

Yep, for the last few months I've been able to find a working 50% off coupon code for all eBooks.

http://www.retailmenot.com/view/oreilly.com

That's the discount for user group members offered through O'Reilly's user group program.

Any recommendations for ruby related o'reilly books that may be hidden gems? (Not aimed at beginners)

Also any recommended books related to web-development / scaling / new languages like go in general which a dev may not buy as a matter of course would be nice also.

I get most of my stuff from pragprog but am open to other options.

Any recommendations for ruby related o'reilly books that may be hidden gems? (Not aimed at beginners)

Greg Brown's Ruby Best Practices.

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596523015.do

Pun intended?

Any recommendations of must-have O'Reilly books? 5000+ items is a heck of a lot to look through in one day.

Narrow it down to topics you actually want to learn?

I was imagining building a list of books which are included which are generally recommended as must-reads, so people could fill out their libraries of known top books.

Don't feel you need to rush out and bulk purchase books. O'Reilly often offer large discounts like this one.

"Collective Intelligence" is a recent favorite and I notice that a bunch stuff from No Starch Press (The TCP/IP Guide / Think Like a Programmer), which I've become a fan of recently, is on sale.

Thanks! That's my book, appreciate you mentioning it.

If it helps, I bought Conrad Barski's Land of Lisp and Steven Levy's Hackers (25th anniversary edition).

with OReilly can't you just enter the ISBN and get the book for $4.99?

edit: This is through registering your(already purchased) print books and then purchasing the corresponding e-book.

Yeah, you can get ebooks for $5 if you 'own' a hard copy. And you prove that you own the hard copy by typing in the ISBN.

Also, they spam out 50% off coupons for ebooks every week.

But ISBNs are available on Amazon.

I think the idea is that "well, if someone's gonna be a dick and get our books against our expressed will, they'll probably just download them off the internet."

I actually have a Safari books online membership, and it gives me "tokens" to download books. The ironic thing is that the safari downloaded books are of poorer quality and in fewer formats than the Oreilly.com books.

Sometimes I cheat and pay $5 for the pristine and versatile oreilly book. My rationalization is that I'm entitled to the highest quality reading experience because I'm paying them $50/mo for the subscription.

Thanks heaps for this awesome hint! Just registered my copy of "definitive guide" to get an ebook much cheaper!

Relevant post from a few days ago from Tor Books on DRM:

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/04/tor-books-uk-drm-free-one-y...

Any recommendations for great books on DevOps or iOS Programming?

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5649458

Does this happen often here?

Sorry in advance for digressing, but had to ask.

Oh well it does, it has happened to me a lot as well. That said, I think the duplicate is due to the difference in URLs of our submission links. Of course, timing on HN matters a lot as well.

Am I the only one bothered by the fact the software is free, but the e-books are not?

They're both merely an arrangement of bits in files, duplicated at a near-zero cost. But one of these (the free one) has usually gone through many man-years of development while the other (the one that costs money) is the result of a few man-weeks or months of effort.

Oh, wait, I just learned that the the non-free quickie version of bits is now available at 50% off. Never mind.

Is it just me or are OReilly books only valuable in print form? I keep them open on my desk and can easily flip around and find what I need. Can't do the same with an eBook.

An OReilly eBook is not terribly useful IMO and not even worth half the print edition.

Get another monitor? :)

JavaScript - The Good Parts $12 http://shop.oreilly.com/product/mobile/9780596517748.do

If I wanted to learn a new topic, such as Python, in general what series are considered better? ie Head First, Missing Manual, Novice to Ninja...

Any opinions ?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5649758

The title of this should read: "OReilly offers 50% discount on ebooks in celebration of 'Hoping To Sell More eBooks'".

Most of the books are cheaper on Amazon even after the 50% discount...

You only get mobi on Amazon.

For some people, that's enough. Not everyone needs 15 copies of the same book.

Not everyone has a Kindle. Giving more choices should be the default. Amazon doesn't do it because they want you to buy their hardware.

Until there's a standard every e-book reader abides to publishers should try to provide for everyone.

I'm not sure Amazon cares about selling hardware -- they have reading apps for Android, iOS, OS X, and the web, probably Windows too.

I think it's more a desire to lock you in to their platform and maybe to make buying as low friction as possible.

You tell me when in a few years you use a different ebook reader...

If they're DRM-free mobi, which I think ORA books are, then Calibre can easily convert them to ePub, etc.

Mobi and the Kindle sucks for technical literature. Tables and program listings are often messed up and unreadable and it is too slow and awkward to jump between different sections.

I love my Kindle for more linearly organized texts though, such as fiction or essays.

And it has DRM on it.

But the point here is a "day against DRM". O'Reilly has really nice DRM-free editions, in multiple formats: PDF, ePub, Mobi, etc.

Programming Android http://www.amazon.com/dp/1449316646/ and http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920023005.do is about $1.80 less expensive at shop.oreilly.com after the discount

Plus, you get a choice of formats. Amazon sells only Kindle format e-books.

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