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Comment by wiremine | Hacker News Reader

I've found myself falling into this pattern, and wondering if others share it:

a. I see a 50% off book at O'Reilly that I'm interested in. b. I check the price at Amazon.com. The regular price is usually a few dollars more than the discount price at oreilly.com. c. I purchase the book at Amazon because it is just easier, even if it slightly more money.

I actually feel a bit bad about this: I'd rather give the money to Tim and Co directly. And, yes, I know it isn't that hard to do this from the O'Reilly site...

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I much prefer buying directly at O'Reilly, given that they can sync the books straight to my Dropbox in both Kindle format and a variety of others, and I particularly like supporting them for their lack of DRM..

Exactly. I don't buy ebooks from Amazon as they only offer Kindle books, whilst I want the epub version.

DRM free and available in dropbox so can be read on my laptop, ipad and android phone at any time is key.

Also feels good to pay the publisher directly and not fund Amazons tax dodging.

I do though have way too many ebooks from O'Reilly and Prag Prog :)

Doesn't Calibre let you convert from Kindle books to epub?

Yes, but the fonts, layouts, tables, diagrams, etc don't translate that well... sometimes OK, sometimes really bad.

I'd rather get a epub directly and save conversions for books that aren't in epub format at all, like fiction/non-fiction kindle format. Text-only or mostly text conversions (e.g. mobi to epub) work much better.

You can hook your Kindle to your O'Reilly account, so purchased books will be sent directly to it.

That being said, you'll still have to enter in your payment information whereas with Amazon is one or two clicks.

I strongly prefer having a PDF to a .mobi (which comes with the PDF on O'Reilly).

Amazon Prime contributes to this. Once a year I spend a pile of money, which by my calculations probably isn't actually worth it. The value I get is how I feel much better about Amazon purchases and don't have to worry about considering what kind of shipping to pay for.

I am willing to spend a couple dollars more on Amazon in the rare event they dont have the best price just becuase of Amazon Prime. Sometimes I will even go to a bookstore to make sure the book I want to buy isnt complete garbage and proceed to purchase it on Amazon right in the store.

I value physical bookstores enough (and having something 'now') that I will spend considerably more at a bookstore. This is especially true given that I've probably also already spent at least a couple of dollars getting to a bookstore with my car.

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