Save 50% on All O'Reilly Ebooks and Videos | Hacker News Reader

Save 50% on All O'Reilly Ebooks and Videos

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50 pointsespeed31 comments

I wish they'd have some sales on physical books. Maybe it's just my traditional thinking, but I have a hard time paying $20+ for a pdf. I understand the publisher needs money, the author has to eat, and the printing costs aren't really a whole ton that you can reduce the price with, but it still just doesn't sit right with me.

I feel like and old curmudgeon.

Side edit: In what kind of strange world does the 2nd edition of an eBook still fetch $32 while the 3rd edition is $36?

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780735618794.do

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0790145385512.do?code=B2S3

Just for the record: You don't just get a PDF. You get a real e-book too.

WHatever. you are missing the point. Copying ebooks cost no money at all, there's no reason an ebook should cost that much in the first place. Dead Tree books were heavily dependent on material and inventory costs, ebooks do not suffer any of those yet they are still sold at similar pricing while they should be at least 90% cheaper, if you just kept the margin at the same level. It's pure profit for the publisher.

So you think that things should be based on their input costs, rather than the value that they provide?

And why is that value on ebooks so much greater than on paper then ? Why would the author be paid 15$ on an ebook and only 1$ on paper for the same customer price ? Is the author creating more value on paper than on a digital format? Certainly not.

To expand ryanhuff's point, it seems like publishers are transitioning from cost-based pricing to value based pricing.

Suppose publishers were to maintain profit margins and reduce prices by about 90%, as you suggest. I posit that their additional sales from lower prices wouldn't compensate for the profit margin drop because their books would hit market saturation first.

  Copying ebooks cost no money at all

Can you please tell me where do I get unlimited storage/bandwith for free?

> WHatever. you are missing the point. Copying ebooks cost no money at all, there's no reason an ebook should cost that much in the first place.

Well, sure, in the world where the only costs that sales price needed to cover were the marginal costs of the current copy, and not some share of the fixed costs of the content.

> Dead Tree books were heavily dependent on material and inventory costs

"Were"? Physical books are still around, you know. Also, those costs are partially marketing costs -- having the book printed and out on the shelf in a bookstore is a form of marketing. While they may not have the printing and inventory costs of physical books, ebooks definitely have marketing costs and, because of the low barriers to entry in the market compared to the market for physical books, arguably have more competing noise that their marketing is trying to be heard over. There's a cost of dealing with it, and the sales price of the books has to pay for it for selling the books to be a profitable business.

> Also, those costs are partially marketing costs -- having the book printed and out on the shelf in a bookstore is a form of marketing. While they may not have the printing and inventory costs of physical books, ebooks definitely have marketing costs and, because of the low barriers to entry in the market compared to the market for physical books, arguably have more competing noise that their marketing is trying to be heard over. There's a cost of dealing with it, and the sales price of the books has to pay for it for selling the books to be a profitable business.

Meh, poor justification. A physical book is not really a form of marketing, there are tons of books sitting on bookshops shelves without ever being touched or opened by anyone. Only when you do an actual marketing campaign you get a prominent display with large amounts of your book in visible areas.

Ebooks have marketing costs but you can target the potential customer much more accurately online than in the shop. Plus, there are tons of mechanisms to get your book reviewed and rated by peers, to have a full site to explain the contents in way more details than you could ever expect in an actual store. Ebook advertising is probably not cheap, but it still is nowhere near justifying the large margin they create on the selling price.

It's a market ripe for disruption.

I'm with you: I like good old dead tree books for so many reasons such as writing in the margins. They should follow Manning books philosophy and also discount physical books as well, a feature which has resulted in my acquiring 10+ books by them.

>dead tree books

Go back to reddit, kid.

>Go back to reddit, kid.

The one-hour-old account says to the two year old account.

Manning is doing up to 50% off on any purchase this weekend, including physical books:

http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs172/1101335703814/archi...

It's silly to keep posting every O'Reilly eBook sale to HN. This is basically just free advertising for them. The 50% discount is nothing special: If you sign up for a membership you get a permanent buy-one-get-one-free discount that O'Reilly interprets as a 50% discount on each book. So just sign up for a membership, wait until you have two books you want to buy, and get a 50% discount without having to wait for a sale.

If I'm not mistaken, and I may well be, you can actually use that code on a single book and it'll work just fine as a 50% off as well. So basically you can get 50% off at any given time, the sales are completely a marketing technique.

I just picked up Understanding Computation and, having made it through the first two chapters at this point, heartily recommend it. If anyone wants to have a little reading group, I'd be interested.

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920025481.do

Author here. Thanks for the recommendation! There’s already a reading group in London (http://lanyrd.com/series/compbookclub/), but that may not be of any use to you.

If anyone else is interested in the book, there's more information at http://computationbook.com/.

Absolutely. I'm glad you wrote it, seems like an unexpected way to approach the subject, and I can see where e.g. this comment[1] comes from. But I think it's quite valuable and inspires me (lacking any CS degree) to pursue further study.

[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1isawq/understa...

O'Reilly is having sale and discounts so often that I avoid buying books at the full price while waiting for a coupon. This often ends with me forgetting about the book and not buying it at all.

Same here. But on rare occasions when I do avail the buy-one-get-one-free offer, the second book invariably goes unread.

Also does anyone know why these 50% discount offers are limited to ebooks only?

Because the margin is obviously higher on ebooks than print books. I imagine that more profit is made on an ebook sale at 50% off than a print book at full price.

Thanks, that seems to be the only reasonable explanation.

Comparing the prices of a book on oreilly[1] and bookdepository.co.uk[2] seems to suggest a print book has about 50%(just a guess) margin while the ebooks sells for almost 100% margin once it is produced. So knocking the prices of ebook down to 50% to drive sales would make sense. Thanks again,

[1]http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596529321.do

[2]http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Programming-Collective-Intel... I assumed that these guys buy the book for 20 dollars and sell for 20 euros and make 25-30% profit. Great site btw with free worldwide shipping although delivery takes anywhere from 1 to 3 weeks.

As soon as you involve Amazon, that's surprisingly not true. Really.

O'Reilly makes more on e-book sales directly through their on-line store then they do on print. However, every e-book they sell via Amazon, their margins are very, very different. Here's a rough guide for a $40 book:

* O'Reilly E-Book Online Store: Approx 99% margin or $39.60

* O'Reilly Store selling print book (bulk print discount assumed): 95% margin or $38.00

* Amazon selling print book (bulk print discount assumed): Approx 90% margin or $36.00

* Amazon selling kindle e-book: 35% margin or $14.00 (minus the Amazon processing fee so it's actually worse)

Odds are the bulk of O'Reilly e-book sales are probably done on Amazon, where the margin is AWFUL. The constant huge sales by O'Reilly are a way to recoup the painful margins insisted upon by Amazon.

Yeah, Amazon makes boatloads off of kindle book sales.

<quote> * O'Reilly Store selling print book (bulk print discount assumed): 95% margin or $38.00 </quote>

Is that really the kind of margins they operate at or is that a typo?

No. Those numbers above are ill-informed.

But yes, the average print costs for a single-color book per unit are in the 2-4 dollar range (that is, manufacturing alone, no design, marketing, editing).

And how would it be possible for Amazon to "keep their lights on" selling physical books at 40% off list price, if they pay O'Reilly $36 for a $40 book? Amazon buys from O'Reilly and most other pubs at 60% off, non-returnable. So the math for the publishers' take from Amazon on physical books looks like this:

[list price] * [.4] - [print costs / overhead] - [author royalty]

Thanks. I was mixing up margin with pre-tax profit.

Maybe this is bad to say, but whenever it comes to "me needing a book" the first thing I do is google "$BOOK_NAME pdf" and check it out.

There is a catch though.. if I find the book a good asset, then I make sure to buy it, but otherwise it just doesn't make sense to gamble $20+ on a book that will be outdated in a year, unlike literature.

BTW, Oreilly books can be bought on Google play(epub only) by less than 4 eur. Not the newest ones, though.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=O%27Reilly+M...

O'Reilly uses a department store pricing structure.

There's almost always a sale, and for eBooks, the sale price is usually not much cheaper than Amazon.com's (or other sellers) "everyday" price. Only suckers pay full-price for their eBooks.

This is pretty unnecessary here.

I'd love to see them do a Steam-style sale where all eBooks are $0.99 for 24h (or something similar).

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