Anytime I'm asked for feedback via the O'Reilly website (I manage the business account for my company), the first thing I always say is that the app is unusable. I've tried it on my Amazon Fire Tablet, Ipad, different phones - it doesn't work.
The user metrics in O'reilly (and probably most learning apps) has floored in the last 12 months. I see they've launched a new AI platform now. They're definitely going in a direction - time will tell if it's the right one.
Personally, I'd love a website that can provide all the ebooks oreilly provides. But it needs to work on a tablet.
It went un-noticed here, I think, but The Pragmatic Bookshelf recently fired most of its staff and are taking on no new books. In the email they sent to authors, they quoted a 40% YoY fall in non-fiction sales, industry-wide.
As an avid reader (and sometimes writer) of technical books, it's sad to see the, perhaps inevitable, decline of the space. I still remember in the early 2000s Barnes and Noble would still have massive shelf space devoted to every technical topic you could imagine. I could spend hours just exploring what languages and topics there were I didn't even know existed. Powell's Technical Books used to be an entire separate store filled with books on every technical topic imaginable.
The publishing industry veterans I've worked with told me it was even more incredible during the height of the dotcom boom: book sales in the 100,000 copy range was not that rare.
Today I can only think of two truly technical book stores that still exist: The MIT Press Bookstore in Cambridge, MA and Ada Books in Seattle, WA. The latter, while a delightful store, has relegated the true technical book section to the backroom, which unfortunately doesn't seem to get refreshed too often (though, part of the beauty of this is it still has many of the weird old technical books that used to be everywhere).
> I still remember in the early 2000s Barnes and Noble would still have massive shelf space devoted to every technical topic you could imagine.
B&N, and Borders, are how I learned to code. Directionless after college, I thought, hey, why not learn how to make websites? And I'd spend a lot of time after work reading books at these stores (and yes, buying too).
The UW bookstore in Seattle like many big science schools had a wondrous technical book section. Isles of Springer. The bookstore itself is a shadow of its former shelf.
My own college experience heavily soured me on both book stores and especially school run book stores. The markup was obscene and their buy back rates were worse.
Half price books and a few other book stores lulled me back a few times, but nonfiction books are kept around mostly as eye candy at this point.
All the US universities outsourced their bookstores.
Now I can't even walk in and browse what books the various departments are using for classes, anymore. Everything is now behind bars and completely inaccessible.
Same with the Stanford university bookstore. Was one of the better bookstores in the Bayarea. Used to have a whole room of technical, science, math books. It too is a shadow of its former self. So sad.
I too am avid reader and was visiting five local bookstores on a weekly basis. Several of them had huge areas stocked with tech books. I had tried Amazon maybe six months after it launched and bought there sporadically. But almost any book i sought was available locally and the savings weren't worth the convenience of purchasing locally.
Then in a three month period in late Spring 2000 all the programming books disappeared. Then my choice was between Amazon with quick delivery and the local store with a slower delivery and a higher price. So been buying from Amazon ever since and I can't remember the last time I have visited a bookstore.
> told me it was even more incredible during the height of the dotcom boom
I was a developer in the 90s before Netscape even came out. I didn't have a computer at home and dialup barely existed. If you wanted to do computer stuff you had to read. If you wanted to try a library you had to buy a CD from a bookstore or mail in an order which would get posted to you.
> As an avid reader (and sometimes writer) of technical books, it's sad to see the, perhaps inevitable, decline of the space.
When I think about this, I get a little bit scared. Imagine books going away, even if it's just the subcategory of technical books.
The printed word has been around for a long time. The number of things that have been printed has always gone up. It really bothers me that that's changing.
PDFs and websites are no substitute for printed paper bound in a cover. PDFs and websites are a fallback when the preferred media isn't available, they are not supposed to be the preferred media. All of the of the reasons that people have given over the years are applicable when it comes to why paper is superior for this.
For the (very) long term, books may be superior, but for the non-illustrated fiction short term, eBooks and an eReader are vastly better. Reading synced to my phone and tablet, takes up less space than a single paperback, and immediate delivery of the next book.
Ugh, tell me about it. In Canada, Chapters put the knife in the independents. They used to have a great selection. Once there was no competition, they reduced their selection by turning half their floor space into selling pillows and candles.
But a lot of is also in blogs and (video) tutorials. As well as Stack Overflow.
And all very searchable.
The old brick-of-paper approach to tech manuals just isn't a thing any more. I don't particularly miss it.
It was, if you think about, usually a slow and inefficient way to present information - often better at presenting what was possible than how to do make it happen.
> often better at presenting what was possible than how to do make it happen.
that, i feel, is the chilling aspect to this situation. does the lack of new books explaining what's possible, imply that our society's opportunites for growth are dwindling?
Weird, I have honestly never walked into a Barnes and Noble and had satisfaction with any of their technical content on the shelf. That pleasure died when we lost Borders.
Yeah, peak experience for me was when our town had both a Borders and B&N offering huge tech book sections. Then Borders closed. Then B&N became a toy store.
Wow, would be interested to read more about this, could you submit the email maybe as its own post? Even as a text version, I actually love the PragProg, would hate to seem them gone (but I guess it’s a foregone conclusion).
I love pragprog but I think nonfiction books in dead tree form is going away. YEs, I know there are people who will pay for a physical book, just not enough to make for a profitable business.
I myself spend around 200-300 usd on books every year. but I haven't bought a physical book in almost a decade. a pdf is perfectly fine. just sell it to me without DRM and have content thats worth the premium over wading through blogs.
How can these companies move forward and update their business model? Personally, I pay for manning's subscription. $24/month all you can eat. I would love more of these publishers switching to a netflix style model.
I consume a lot of short form technical content via blogs. would love a site where I can find medium written content with editorial oversight and quality control for technical correctness. obviously this costs money and it would be worth it to pay for that. I already do with manning. most of the content I consume are MEAPS. bleeding edge stuff that would likely be out of date by the time it makes it to dead paper form.
This would be advantageous to the publishers as well. this shifts the focus to put the content on the web and mobile in ways that are easy to access. The publishers also get data on what gets consumed informing what technical resources to commission.
They take up valuable screen space, it is annoying to scroll to the sections you need.
Yeah yeah some PDFs have the side navigation thing. Most don't
With a book I can put in those little flags to bookmark sections, I can easily riffle the pages and scan for the chapter I need, I can hand write in the margins
I often need 2 or 3 books open to different sections, I like keeping them on my desk so I can glance at them when I need to
I've probably cracked $1000 spent on books this year.
Same; avid reader of printed books here. I have more pdfs I can count (most coming from Humble Bundle impulse buying), but nothing beats physical books for me.
I got a remarkable pro, and it's just slightly better than screen. Being able to annotate books is actually a welcomed addition, and the screen is pretty decent. But flipping screen is slow (compared to a printed book), and going back and forth between pages is a hassle. Until we have the speed of a tablet (read: instant), with the screen quality of an e-ink, I don't think I'll voluntarily retire printed books.
Now, I have an O'Reilly subscription (two actually, through school and ACM), but the app is sadly horrendous, as OP mentioned. Hard to believe this is actually their core business.
My (tablet) PDF reader has bookmarks (which I use to make a TOC if needed) and annotations and cloud sync of the PDFs to my phone for on the go. And it has text search and zoom. Plus it holds hundreds of books that I can carry with me.
Definitely isn't the latter. Numerical Recipes and Hacker's Delight have tons of gems that you won't get from an LLM, or that an LLM will even understand despite appearing all their training sets.
Even before LLMs became big I started hording solid technical books, as there was so much misinformation on Google/SO that any non-trivial technical question could not be answer without a high probability that the answer was fundamentally wrong.
LLMs are super helpful for learning, but without the foundation of a true textbook at your side they will very easily go off the rails into a world of imagination.
I think it’s largely because of eBooks, and the proliferation of lower-effort eBooks on the market. The latter is increasing because people use LLMs to write them. To actually make money on tech books, you kind of have to be a juggernaut or have some runaway hit titles. Once isn’t enough, either, because someone’s always putting out something newer on the same topic or people are moving to a different stack altogether.
even before LLMs you could/can get a lot of info on the web. Most ideas presented in books exist on the internet somewhere, quite a few pass through HN. In the 90s and early 2ks I used to hoard books, but now, not so much, I get a few through my library these days but a lot of times I just find the book is padded out to be a book and the meaty bit of the book is usually tiny.
I also find that docs have gotten a lot better over time as well. I feel that Y2K era of numerous large tomes was largely to fill in the gap left after software publishers stopped shipping even their full price boxed software with meaty manuals, assuming I guess that help menus and GUI context (or maybe even Clippy) would get you there. Even some of the enterprisey software- Oracle comes to mind- would ship with like 6-10 volumes of reference information but very little in the way of a getting started guide that showed you how to get basic stuff up and running or what best practices were.
The web got a little better, and what drove brainshare and usage was a good experience getting started with reasonable defaults and good docs to get you started. API design is also much better these days- I was trying to find some examples of how unintuitive say MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes- big in the win9x days) apis were, but a lot of those docs seem to have disappeared- here is a stackoverflow/experts-exchange links that show how non-intuitive it was: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3255207/window-handle-in...https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/10018203/How-to-g...
Motif on the Unix side of things was a bit better, but not much. You really needed a good book to walk you through things in a more understandable way.
This is it. I know of too many companies (in nonfiction, specifically) trying to offload as much as possible to LLMs, damn the quality. Zero chance I buy any nonfiction written after 2021 or so unless it comes with strong recommendations from sources I trust. No more on-a-whim purchases because something looks interesting and is on sale or whatever. That’s over.
Maybe a bit depressing, but I'm not sure loaded. I was just talking to someone (in person!) a few days ago, who purported that online courses were basically dead, because people can learn from LLMs instead.
And then, it seems to be a real issue amongst some people to ask, "why should I learn X, when LLMs already know it?" Not unlike, "why should I learn to divide, when we have calculators?" but on a grander scale.
Statements like these always brings me to memory the opening line of Hamming's Numerical Methods book: The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers. It is very easy to get carried away and forget that - in particular today when processing power grows exponentially. Even more when we know there are a myriad of problems that are uncomputable, literally, and human common sense and intuition (insight) are as relevant now as ever.
My hypothesis is people will get burned out on this unguided learning via LLMs and still want some sort of curated/guided learning experience through material to understand some subject.
There is the problem of "I don't know what I don't know" that a course can solve for you. An LLM can sort of do that, but you have to take its word for it, and it does it pretty much strictly worse at the moment (but is much more flexible).
> My hypothesis is people will get burned out on this unguided learning via LLMs [...]
I'm less optimistic. Already 20+ years ago many people complained if you pointed them to books which answered their questions in depth. The standard reply was "just tell me how to solve this particular problem" instead.
Honestly, I wonder how some of these publishers stay in business at all. I haven't written a book, but I've been a technical reviewer for friends who have been published with some of the larger technical publishers. Nobody was making money from the process. I do wonder if maybe they're just taking on too many titles and reaching saturation. Do we really need "The guide to making X on Y with Z" for every potential iteration?
From the people I know who wrote or co-wrote books, the way you make money is in future interview processes.
I don't know if they still do it, but when I interviewed for Google, they had a self-ranking system of how competent you are in each technology, and the only way to get the top score was phrased something like "I wrote the book on it (yes, an actual book)".
Sibling comments are mostly saying they either started hoarding books or switched to some combination of blog posts, Stackoverflow, and LLMs. For those with books, how are you using them?
The shelf life of technology books is shorter than it takes to read them. Most were notebooks of students quickly edited into a learning tool. Oh wow more Python recipes. Another introduction to C++!
The worlds moved on from valuing the latest DSL and additions to the Linux kernel. Just a fad marketed at GenX and older Millennials.
SaaS is something tech billionaires need to exist. It's not something humanity needs. Not at the scale of the 2010s ZIRP fueled mania, anyway. Employers were using subscriptions to O'Reilly as a perk. No budget for perks in the AI and economic austerity era.
Maps app, communication apps, media consumption are all most of the billions of smartphone users care about.
I don't use an app, I use website via SFPL proxy, and it works just fine on iPad Pro (12"), but bookmarks do not work, so you need to remember where you stopped to continue after re-login.
I haven't used any O'Reilly products, but if your library offers any, you can probably access the product via libby, which works on a phone/tablet? Just a guess. Libby also supports sending the data to kindles, at least.
I agree wholeheartedly. The app is unusable and unstable. I had to delete collections from the web because they were getting corrupted in the app.
One thing I notice is that it simply does not render many code snippets well, especially when using the "page" (vs "continuous" scrolling). I don't get the impression they are doing QA on rendering quality. Not only external publishers, but O'Reilly books themselves! I also had a lot of problems reading Manning books in their app.
Rendering e-books properly is a pretty big table-stake thing.
> Personally, I'd love a website that can provide all the ebooks oreilly provides. But it needs to work on a tablet.
Can't you just download pirated copies as a pdf or epub and read them on any device? It feels much more convenient than using a shitty DRM app, and if you have ethical concerns nothing's stopping you from still paying for a subscription while doing that.
If you are in Bay area, San Francisco Public Library (sfpl.org) gives you access to O'Reilly for free, if you have library card, while it does not improve on usability issues, at 0 cost it is phenomenal resource.
My two problems with access through libraries is lack of app access, and that every time I login, all my progress is gone (not reset to cover - gone gone), and I have to find the resource again, open it and go to the page/time I was at. Also can’t create my own playlist or favorites.
I already have a San Francisco Public Library card because it gives me access to some very useful archives, but I had no idea that I could access O'Reilly as well. Thanks for mentioning this!
You can quite often get a $300 yearly sub to O'Reilly, they run a discount ~4 times a year.
That said, like a lot of other content subscriptions, it can be quite anxiety inducing to make it seem like you're getting your money's worth. I've gotten the sub via my work, and I think the labs and videos are quite good, plus the occasional opportunities to do live-chats with the authors. But you have to sift through a lot of content and dedicate a lot of hours to use them. For most folks, I think buying a few technical books a year as needed would be a much better use of time and money.
Also check if you're in education at any level. Most university libraries subscribe to what used to be Safari and you can SSO the full (enormous) catalogue. I didn't realize this for quite a long time as it's not widely advertised. There are ton of books that aren't the traditional animal-drawing tech titles, including Manning, as well as some lecture series.
But the app is pretty kludgey and it's way more locked down than other publishers who will give you chapter PDFs.
At least it's a good way to skim books to see if they're worth buying a physical copy.
At one time I worked at a research institute. It had a huge library that was only partially filled. One of the directors wanted to buy every developer their own Safari subscription. The cost was quoted at around $4K/mo IIRC.
I pointed out that it would be far more cost–effective to simple let us request hard copies of whatever books we wanted, and then they would just stay in the library. No one worked remotely at the time.
We ended up getting Safari subscriptions for everyone.
It’s capex vs. opex. A large enough company has a fixed budget for both, and for your situation, I assume that the opex budget had the funds, while the capex did not.
Maybe it's just some peculiarity I'm missing, but wouldn't a smaller capex sum be a pareto improvement over a larger opex? Is there any way in which denying the suggestion was rational?
Yes, spending less money is better than spending more money (though there can be potential tax treatment differences or other complexities depending on exactly how money is spent), but that doesn't mean the person in charge of approving an employee's expense is authorized to approve expenses however they please. If they're given a budget that says they get X money in one category and Y money in another, they can't spend (X-2Z, Y+Z) and can only choose to spend (X,Y) or deny the request. Big organizations often have a lot of inefficiencies due to process.
To be clear, my question was about whether there is a situation where it is rational from a management accounting perspective to define a unit's budget like this.
Imagine you own a factory that makes plastic widgets. The factory has a widget-making machine.
You'll pay rent on the factory and interest on the loan you took out to buy the widget-making machine whether you make one widget or a million. But the amount you'll spend on plastic and machine operator wages goes up the more widgets you want to make.
So you can plot a line, y=mx+c where y is the amount you spend and x is the number of widgets you make. m is the cost of plastic and worker wages, c is the cost of rent and loan interest. (Obviously this is a simplification)
You would carefully monitor the per-unit costs of plastic and machine operator wages - but if you've got a machine that turns 10 cents of plastic into a $1 widget, the more plastic you put in the more profit you make. Only an idiot would try to save money by refusing to buy plastic.
On the other hand, if you need to take out a loan to buy plastic, that's an ominous sign indeed - because the previous batch of widgets should have sold at a profit, giving you all the cash needed to buy the plastic for the next batch.
Business is going great, in fact you're running your widget-making machine at full capacity, and you decide to buy a second one - which is an almighty expense, but definitely a sensible one. If you accounted for this the same way you account for plastic, your accounts would look crazy - you were making decent profit every year, then you suddenly took a 800% loss one year? - so instead this is shown in a separate place in the accounts.
Obviously, you do want to invest in new machines when it's profitable to do so - but if you have to delay the purchase by a few months, it's not the end of the world. And taking out a loan to buy the machine could be reasonable.
So basically operating expenses (plastic) and capital expenses (new machines) are paid for differently, managed differently, and accounted for differently.
Of course if you don't operate a widget factory, the distinctions and the reasons for them might be a lot less clear.
> If you accounted for this the same way you account for plastic, your accounts would look crazy
This is purely a problem if you have to get a loan or something. If you’re the sole owner of the business, you can count money the normal way, since it’s all the same money to you. I.e. you don’t have to spend silly amounts on renting when owning is actually cheaper.
Did you just write a short lesson to explain the difference between capex and opex? Well... thank you, I guess.
But again, the question is: is it ever rational for a functional unit manager to be given a particular maximum opex budget and not be allowed to capitalize a part of that? What benefit would such a restriction offer to the business?
> What benefit would such a restriction offer to the business?
You approve opex budget for the widget department because you know they can turn 10 cents of plastic into $1 of widgets, and you want them doing that in the forthcoming quarter. You're happy for them to spend a nigh-unlimited amount on inputs like plastic, so long as it's on things with a 90% margin.
But you don't want the department head spending their nigh-unlimited budget on things that don't get sold on with a 90% margin. So you don't let them charge the O'Reilly books to the nigh-unlimited part of their budget.
Thanks, I see how this would make sense in general. But it does go against this particular case, no? L&D should probably be budgeted outside the widget COGS anyway, but assuming that the widget department has a single budget, and they're going to be using it for O'Reilly books anyway, is it still somehow rational to pay more for a subscription than less for owning the books? Is it just that that consider the extra accounting effort to be more expensive than dealing with the relatively small inefficiencies?
I've worked in similar scenarios and advocated for the Safari subscription. The most obvious problem with the physical book solution is that not everyone can read the same book at the same time. In my experience it's very common that, because some topic is particularly relevant for the team, many people will want to read the same book. At the same time, you do not want 30 copies of a book that was read by everyone 3 years ago sitting on the shelf.
And, as far as expenses go for a research institute, $4k/mo is very inexpensive.
For a while, the O'Reilly subscription was included in the $99/yr ACM membership. Then they stopped offering O'Reilly for a bit. Then they brought it back as part of the $75 skills add-on.
I feel like this is a little known secret (discount via ACM) that more folks should know about. Hopefully this post helps spread the word.
> ACM is pleased to share an important milestone for the computing field. Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library will be made open access.
If your paying $500 for an O’Reilly subscription, then the $99 membership plus $75 add-on for O'Reilly would seem to make it so even if you don't use any of the other facilities:
> unlimited access to ACM's collection of thousands of online books, video courses, interactive sandboxes, practice labs, and AI-enabled tools from O'Reilly and Skillsoft Percipio
I don’t think you get the same level of access though? I tried an O’Reilly subscription directly then went the ACM route and remember being disappointed that it was a more limited subscription.
I just checked, and I've had an O'Reilly account since March of 2014 without major interruption, back when it was called Safari. It is by far the best source for high quality tech content out there. There is so much filler content in tech blogs, that I'm happy to pay to get access to high quality.
I must be on some grandfathered plan though, as I'm not paying near $500/year. That is a very steep price.
Same. Mine is grandfathered in price from long ago. I couldn't work without it, although LLMs are becoming a good substitute for some subjects. The mobile app is a roach motel though.
My account is from 2007ish and even cheaper. I just hope there won't ever be a problem with my yearly payment because obviously they won't reopen it on old terms.
Well, it's good business for them and for me. I can access books when it comes to my mind (not that often). They get the money. I would certainly never subscribe again at current rates.
I'm grandfathered in at $200/year from the Safari days. The main advantage of the subscription to me is being able to evaluate several books on a topic to pick the one that is the best fit for what I need.
If I knew which books were best in category, it would be cheaper for me to just buy those specific books (or video courses, for things like Blender).
But if I had to pay the current $500 price, I wouldn't be a subscriber.
Agreed, I'm also on a $200/year plan and for me too the fact that I can skim multiple books on a single topic before settling on one is well worth the money.
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.
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.
When I was consuming close to a book a month, I thought it was pretty well worth it.. it's hard to justify otherwise. Before Amazon got big, I would browser B&N/Borders etc. for technical books and it was nice... even after Amazon, I remember driving across town for a book that I kind of needed before the weekend for a project.
Amazon then became my main go-to... then more blog articles and technical posts became prevalent... StackOverflow grew to similar dominance. Now, I buy a handful of books for my Kindle a couple times a year and may or may not get through them. I'm more inclined to just read online docs, search or even look at AI results than read through books. I miss dead tree books, but the space and moving them kinda sucks. Not to mention, that even with glasses the text is a bit hard for me now.
I'm still an avid tech reader, just more blogs and less books... I used to tear through 500-800 pages on a typical weekend. After 3 decades in this career, I'm a bit more inclined to veg out in front of the TV.
> Unfortunately, I cannot read technical books fast and definitely not fast enough to make the subscription be worth $500 per year.
For me I find the $500 to be a pretty clear win as far as value goes. My shelves are already overflowing with, while not "timeless", much slower aging technical books. But quite often, throughout a year, I'll want a deeper dive into a current topic than I can get from online resources + Claude. Quite often that dive involves wanting to look through multiple books (even if only using a few chapters).
I know I'm a dying breed, but, while I love AI for interactive exploration and learning, I find books more valuable in the era of endless YouTube tutorials and AI slop blog posts. Technical topics benefit from "big picture" thinking that basically doesn't exist in modern short-form web content.
Books still activate a different part of the brain than reading on a screen, including e-ink, so it's not you or a dying breed, people may turn out to not learn as deeply or as quickly.
Every library I've had a library card for (Toronto Public Library 7ish years ago, and BANQ Montréal) have had O'reilly subscriptions for free! A few other people have mentioned it in this thread with specific cities, but check your local one! It seems really common.
I signed up many years ago when they had 50% off and then was allowed to renew at the same price. Made it very difficult to cancel, knowing that I will have to pay full price if I ever want it back, but one year I looked at how much I had paid in total for reading those books and decided to cancel anyway.
Great site though. I never used the app, but mobile browser support was not bad.
Paid for it to read computer books, and did a lot of that, but also discovered much else. They also had (have?) courses and paid video presentation. I noticed one series of videos I watched there would have cost more to watch legally than I paid for an entire year of O'Reilly.
I've concluded exactly the same!
It's far more cost effective to buy individual books than paying for the subscription.
Hard copies can also be sold if I decide not to keep them, which offsets costs even more
I'm genuinely baffled by the amount of people here who actually use those proprietary DRM book apps. I understand paying for the subscription to support the authors/publisher, but surely you can just pay for a subscription and then still download the books as DRM-free pdfs/epubs? Is there a single reason to use those publisher apps?
I have O'Reilly subs available both from my employer and my local library. Doesn't fix the UI issues but does at least shift the ROI calculus.
There are some applications that try to export O'Reilly books into Kindle formats, but every time I've tried they've mangled a few tables, formulas or sidebars, etc. I should probably sell or hand down my kindle and find something more suitable to O'Reilly.
I have figured that I’m going to get exactly one CS hobby that is not work, and 0 CS hobby if I can find a job that fits the hobby.
Then I figured there are less than ten books that I need to read, and probably less if I can get such a job because it is always a lot better to learn on the job.
So I agree with the author that such subscription is not very useful, and a paper book + a paper notepad are way better than reading books on a tablet.
O'Reilly's mobile app is always a moment of zen: You open it to read a book to enhance your professional skills, but alas, the app is obviously poorly written despite being created by people in your profession (who seem to have not read the books?)
Anyway, the web experience has been pretty good for a while, so I use that now.
> will most likely not make me renew my subscription for the new year. Given the price, it will be probably
Will the author find the time and energy to actually cancel the subscription? The fact that he wrote the blog post and still haven’t cancelled makes me wonder.
(From my experience) O'reilly is very responsive and open to direct feedback less to rants on the net, I think you should use their contact channels and send feedback :-)
Lately I just ask an LLM to teach me things interactively. It will be interesting to see if that stops working so well, when authors stop writing books for LLMs to absorb. Maybe as long as there is some kind of canonical reference, the LLM can bridge the gap to decent educational material. If so, that's kind of sad, but also kind of awesome at the same time. It's definitely an interesting time to be alive. I wish I was just a little closer to retirement, though...
For me one of the best ways until now to get good quality IT books is (believe it or not): Humble Bundle (https://www.humblebundle.com/)
The past year they featured bundles from (quickly out of my head): O'Reilly, MIT Press, Manning, Pearson, Pragmatic Programmers and No Starch Press.
Oh, and Packt. But I left that one out because the quality of most Packt books is total shit (IMO).
It's the next best thing besides going on the seven seas if you want to reliably read IT related books on a ereader without spending a ton of money. (book bundles go for about $20 to $30 each, with most if of not all of them totaling up to $1000 or sometimes even more in value).
If you're fast there's still time to get these right now:
I was once asked to review a Packt book on a subject I knew well. Not only did it contain many factual errors, I wasn't allowed to point them out for correction - they rejected those suggestions. As I recall they wanted my free labor just to review presentation and basically rubber stamp it.
Back when I subscribed to O'Reilly I had a bookmark set up to search there with Packt excluded. Otherwise no matter what I searched for the results were clogged up with Packt-slop.
I think this is precisely the Packt strategy though - to always overwhelm the search results, whether its O'reilly, Amazon, etc. They do this by their sheer volume of low quality titles. Everything about that company and their content is complete shit.
Manning wins points for giving me DRM free books and for their website. It's really nice and I like reading the books on it. So much so that I wish I could sync pdfs to the Web progress.
Good job Manning!
I hate the UX of O'reilly. Great books, but horrible HX. That company seems to have people who do not dogfood.
I work for a publishing company that sells elearning access to the proprietary “framework”. Anyways our company is now going full bore on AI related content. Everyone is just milling about having meetings about our AI product line but the company is sinking.
We don’t focus any effort on our core services and product, just chase the next fad.
If other publishing companies are anything like the one I work for then they’re clawing at the wall looking for the next big thing. Since AI is a big question mark, they are publishing absolute drivel.
Do folks have opinions on the quality of the recent books? Last one I picked up was not good (good chance it is partially AI slop).
Read online (and not in the app), but the copy-editing did not do it any favors, and then how code snippets were formed broke the simple copy/paste (used icons for line breaks that could have been avoidable).
Anytime I'm asked for feedback via the O'Reilly website (I manage the business account for my company), the first thing I always say is that the app is unusable. I've tried it on my Amazon Fire Tablet, Ipad, different phones - it doesn't work.
The user metrics in O'reilly (and probably most learning apps) has floored in the last 12 months. I see they've launched a new AI platform now. They're definitely going in a direction - time will tell if it's the right one.
Personally, I'd love a website that can provide all the ebooks oreilly provides. But it needs to work on a tablet.
It went un-noticed here, I think, but The Pragmatic Bookshelf recently fired most of its staff and are taking on no new books. In the email they sent to authors, they quoted a 40% YoY fall in non-fiction sales, industry-wide.
As an avid reader (and sometimes writer) of technical books, it's sad to see the, perhaps inevitable, decline of the space. I still remember in the early 2000s Barnes and Noble would still have massive shelf space devoted to every technical topic you could imagine. I could spend hours just exploring what languages and topics there were I didn't even know existed. Powell's Technical Books used to be an entire separate store filled with books on every technical topic imaginable.
The publishing industry veterans I've worked with told me it was even more incredible during the height of the dotcom boom: book sales in the 100,000 copy range was not that rare.
Today I can only think of two truly technical book stores that still exist: The MIT Press Bookstore in Cambridge, MA and Ada Books in Seattle, WA. The latter, while a delightful store, has relegated the true technical book section to the backroom, which unfortunately doesn't seem to get refreshed too often (though, part of the beauty of this is it still has many of the weird old technical books that used to be everywhere).
> I still remember in the early 2000s Barnes and Noble would still have massive shelf space devoted to every technical topic you could imagine.
B&N, and Borders, are how I learned to code. Directionless after college, I thought, hey, why not learn how to make websites? And I'd spend a lot of time after work reading books at these stores (and yes, buying too).
The UW bookstore in Seattle like many big science schools had a wondrous technical book section. Isles of Springer. The bookstore itself is a shadow of its former shelf.
My own college experience heavily soured me on both book stores and especially school run book stores. The markup was obscene and their buy back rates were worse.
Half price books and a few other book stores lulled me back a few times, but nonfiction books are kept around mostly as eye candy at this point.
All the US universities outsourced their bookstores.
Now I can't even walk in and browse what books the various departments are using for classes, anymore. Everything is now behind bars and completely inaccessible.
Yes, I was so disappointed with my visit last year - not yet hopeless, but close to it. Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle is a better place.
Elliot Bay is a shadow of what it used to be when it was in Pioneer Square.
We should all take the train to Powell's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell%27s_Books
Which one? The original one in Chicago or that other one in Portland?
Elliott Bay is in Seattle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_Bay
Same with the Stanford university bookstore. Was one of the better bookstores in the Bayarea. Used to have a whole room of technical, science, math books. It too is a shadow of its former self. So sad.
I cry when I visit the Stanford Bookstore. In the 1980's if I needed any technical book, it was there. Now, just stupid clothing.
I too am avid reader and was visiting five local bookstores on a weekly basis. Several of them had huge areas stocked with tech books. I had tried Amazon maybe six months after it launched and bought there sporadically. But almost any book i sought was available locally and the savings weren't worth the convenience of purchasing locally.
Then in a three month period in late Spring 2000 all the programming books disappeared. Then my choice was between Amazon with quick delivery and the local store with a slower delivery and a higher price. So been buying from Amazon ever since and I can't remember the last time I have visited a bookstore.
> told me it was even more incredible during the height of the dotcom boom
I was a developer in the 90s before Netscape even came out. I didn't have a computer at home and dialup barely existed. If you wanted to do computer stuff you had to read. If you wanted to try a library you had to buy a CD from a bookstore or mail in an order which would get posted to you.
> As an avid reader (and sometimes writer) of technical books, it's sad to see the, perhaps inevitable, decline of the space.
When I think about this, I get a little bit scared. Imagine books going away, even if it's just the subcategory of technical books.
The printed word has been around for a long time. The number of things that have been printed has always gone up. It really bothers me that that's changing.
PDFs and websites are no substitute for printed paper bound in a cover. PDFs and websites are a fallback when the preferred media isn't available, they are not supposed to be the preferred media. All of the of the reasons that people have given over the years are applicable when it comes to why paper is superior for this.
For the (very) long term, books may be superior, but for the non-illustrated fiction short term, eBooks and an eReader are vastly better. Reading synced to my phone and tablet, takes up less space than a single paperback, and immediate delivery of the next book.
Also, physical books are immutable; electronic content is not. Orwell was not wrong, just premature.
Ugh, tell me about it. In Canada, Chapters put the knife in the independents. They used to have a great selection. Once there was no competition, they reduced their selection by turning half their floor space into selling pillows and candles.
This makes sense, "enough" of the old technical info is in the AI brains now and easily accessed via a query.
A lossy compressed version of it, at least.
But a lot of is also in blogs and (video) tutorials. As well as Stack Overflow.
And all very searchable.
The old brick-of-paper approach to tech manuals just isn't a thing any more. I don't particularly miss it.
It was, if you think about, usually a slow and inefficient way to present information - often better at presenting what was possible than how to do make it happen.
> often better at presenting what was possible than how to do make it happen.
that, i feel, is the chilling aspect to this situation. does the lack of new books explaining what's possible, imply that our society's opportunites for growth are dwindling?
Ada's these days is more about politics than technology.
What kind of politics? I mean, what do they sell, little to no tech books?
Just go see for yourself?
Not living in the US, so cannot.
Weird, I have honestly never walked into a Barnes and Noble and had satisfaction with any of their technical content on the shelf. That pleasure died when we lost Borders.
*Edit: spell correct kills me!
Yeah, peak experience for me was when our town had both a Borders and B&N offering huge tech book sections. Then Borders closed. Then B&N became a toy store.
Borders was always the king for books, magazines and DVD media.
That's a shame. I got an email from them suggesting that they had a tough year.
I bought 2 books even though I won't have time to read them anytime soon.
Hopefully they'll find a way to keep going.
Wow, would be interested to read more about this, could you submit the email maybe as its own post? Even as a text version, I actually love the PragProg, would hate to seem them gone (but I guess it’s a foregone conclusion).
I love pragprog but I think nonfiction books in dead tree form is going away. YEs, I know there are people who will pay for a physical book, just not enough to make for a profitable business.
I myself spend around 200-300 usd on books every year. but I haven't bought a physical book in almost a decade. a pdf is perfectly fine. just sell it to me without DRM and have content thats worth the premium over wading through blogs.
How can these companies move forward and update their business model? Personally, I pay for manning's subscription. $24/month all you can eat. I would love more of these publishers switching to a netflix style model.
I consume a lot of short form technical content via blogs. would love a site where I can find medium written content with editorial oversight and quality control for technical correctness. obviously this costs money and it would be worth it to pay for that. I already do with manning. most of the content I consume are MEAPS. bleeding edge stuff that would likely be out of date by the time it makes it to dead paper form.
This would be advantageous to the publishers as well. this shifts the focus to put the content on the web and mobile in ways that are easy to access. The publishers also get data on what gets consumed informing what technical resources to commission.
I on the other hand can't stand PDFs.
They take up valuable screen space, it is annoying to scroll to the sections you need. Yeah yeah some PDFs have the side navigation thing. Most don't
With a book I can put in those little flags to bookmark sections, I can easily riffle the pages and scan for the chapter I need, I can hand write in the margins
I often need 2 or 3 books open to different sections, I like keeping them on my desk so I can glance at them when I need to
I've probably cracked $1000 spent on books this year.
I’m similar to you. I recently went as far as to buy a pdf for an out of print book and then paid to have it printed and bound.
I suppose a remarkable would be another route but… they are pricey.
Same; avid reader of printed books here. I have more pdfs I can count (most coming from Humble Bundle impulse buying), but nothing beats physical books for me.
I got a remarkable pro, and it's just slightly better than screen. Being able to annotate books is actually a welcomed addition, and the screen is pretty decent. But flipping screen is slow (compared to a printed book), and going back and forth between pages is a hassle. Until we have the speed of a tablet (read: instant), with the screen quality of an e-ink, I don't think I'll voluntarily retire printed books.
Now, I have an O'Reilly subscription (two actually, through school and ACM), but the app is sadly horrendous, as OP mentioned. Hard to believe this is actually their core business.
My (tablet) PDF reader has bookmarks (which I use to make a TOC if needed) and annotations and cloud sync of the PDFs to my phone for on the go. And it has text search and zoom. Plus it holds hundreds of books that I can carry with me.
I assume you read a lot. How do you consume books, and how do you organize knowledge?
...
I don't think this was supposed to be public knowledge.
Out of an abundance of caution, I've deleted it. So there we are.
> Out of an abundance of caution, I've deleted it. So there we are.
Out of an abundance of curiosity, I discovered an archive of your comment, which I didn’t myself make, but I link here for purposes of discussion:
https://archive.is/C3gAc
Is this because people seek knowledge from LLMs rather than from books now?
Or is it because LLMs know everything that is in books, so people don't feel compelled to learn any more themselves?
Definitely isn't the latter. Numerical Recipes and Hacker's Delight have tons of gems that you won't get from an LLM, or that an LLM will even understand despite appearing all their training sets.
Even before LLMs became big I started hording solid technical books, as there was so much misinformation on Google/SO that any non-trivial technical question could not be answer without a high probability that the answer was fundamentally wrong.
LLMs are super helpful for learning, but without the foundation of a true textbook at your side they will very easily go off the rails into a world of imagination.
Any recommendations for a few keepers a programmer should have?
I think it’s largely because of eBooks, and the proliferation of lower-effort eBooks on the market. The latter is increasing because people use LLMs to write them. To actually make money on tech books, you kind of have to be a juggernaut or have some runaway hit titles. Once isn’t enough, either, because someone’s always putting out something newer on the same topic or people are moving to a different stack altogether.
even before LLMs you could/can get a lot of info on the web. Most ideas presented in books exist on the internet somewhere, quite a few pass through HN. In the 90s and early 2ks I used to hoard books, but now, not so much, I get a few through my library these days but a lot of times I just find the book is padded out to be a book and the meaty bit of the book is usually tiny.
I also find that docs have gotten a lot better over time as well. I feel that Y2K era of numerous large tomes was largely to fill in the gap left after software publishers stopped shipping even their full price boxed software with meaty manuals, assuming I guess that help menus and GUI context (or maybe even Clippy) would get you there. Even some of the enterprisey software- Oracle comes to mind- would ship with like 6-10 volumes of reference information but very little in the way of a getting started guide that showed you how to get basic stuff up and running or what best practices were.
The web got a little better, and what drove brainshare and usage was a good experience getting started with reasonable defaults and good docs to get you started. API design is also much better these days- I was trying to find some examples of how unintuitive say MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes- big in the win9x days) apis were, but a lot of those docs seem to have disappeared- here is a stackoverflow/experts-exchange links that show how non-intuitive it was: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3255207/window-handle-in... https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/10018203/How-to-g...
Motif on the Unix side of things was a bit better, but not much. You really needed a good book to walk you through things in a more understandable way.
Another option might be that people are increasingly using LLMs to write the books.
This is it. I know of too many companies (in nonfiction, specifically) trying to offload as much as possible to LLMs, damn the quality. Zero chance I buy any nonfiction written after 2021 or so unless it comes with strong recommendations from sources I trust. No more on-a-whim purchases because something looks interesting and is on sale or whatever. That’s over.
But even before LLMs, how many of those nonfiction books were any better than an assembly of random blog snippets?
Damn few of them.
I'm thinking the "industry" will contract a lot, but there will always be a niche for deep "real books" on a subject. It will just be much smaller.
loaded questions.
Maybe a bit depressing, but I'm not sure loaded. I was just talking to someone (in person!) a few days ago, who purported that online courses were basically dead, because people can learn from LLMs instead.
And then, it seems to be a real issue amongst some people to ask, "why should I learn X, when LLMs already know it?" Not unlike, "why should I learn to divide, when we have calculators?" but on a grander scale.
Statements like these always brings me to memory the opening line of Hamming's Numerical Methods book: The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers. It is very easy to get carried away and forget that - in particular today when processing power grows exponentially. Even more when we know there are a myriad of problems that are uncomputable, literally, and human common sense and intuition (insight) are as relevant now as ever.
My hypothesis is people will get burned out on this unguided learning via LLMs and still want some sort of curated/guided learning experience through material to understand some subject.
There is the problem of "I don't know what I don't know" that a course can solve for you. An LLM can sort of do that, but you have to take its word for it, and it does it pretty much strictly worse at the moment (but is much more flexible).
> My hypothesis is people will get burned out on this unguided learning via LLMs [...]
I'm less optimistic. Already 20+ years ago many people complained if you pointed them to books which answered their questions in depth. The standard reply was "just tell me how to solve this particular problem" instead.
<cough> StackOverflow... they made a business out of that.
Honestly, I wonder how some of these publishers stay in business at all. I haven't written a book, but I've been a technical reviewer for friends who have been published with some of the larger technical publishers. Nobody was making money from the process. I do wonder if maybe they're just taking on too many titles and reaching saturation. Do we really need "The guide to making X on Y with Z" for every potential iteration?
> Nobody was making money from the process.
From the people I know who wrote or co-wrote books, the way you make money is in future interview processes.
I don't know if they still do it, but when I interviewed for Google, they had a self-ranking system of how competent you are in each technology, and the only way to get the top score was phrased something like "I wrote the book on it (yes, an actual book)".
Anecdotal evidence, all books I bought this year were used.
Sibling comments are mostly saying they either started hoarding books or switched to some combination of blog posts, Stackoverflow, and LLMs. For those with books, how are you using them?
Citation needed
The shelf life of technology books is shorter than it takes to read them. Most were notebooks of students quickly edited into a learning tool. Oh wow more Python recipes. Another introduction to C++!
The worlds moved on from valuing the latest DSL and additions to the Linux kernel. Just a fad marketed at GenX and older Millennials.
SaaS is something tech billionaires need to exist. It's not something humanity needs. Not at the scale of the 2010s ZIRP fueled mania, anyway. Employers were using subscriptions to O'Reilly as a perk. No budget for perks in the AI and economic austerity era.
Maps app, communication apps, media consumption are all most of the billions of smartphone users care about.
Your map- and communication apps are SaaS.
Not all map apps - I keep offline map apps just in case.
I don't use an app, I use website via SFPL proxy, and it works just fine on iPad Pro (12"), but bookmarks do not work, so you need to remember where you stopped to continue after re-login.
I haven't used any O'Reilly products, but if your library offers any, you can probably access the product via libby, which works on a phone/tablet? Just a guess. Libby also supports sending the data to kindles, at least.
I agree wholeheartedly. The app is unusable and unstable. I had to delete collections from the web because they were getting corrupted in the app.
One thing I notice is that it simply does not render many code snippets well, especially when using the "page" (vs "continuous" scrolling). I don't get the impression they are doing QA on rendering quality. Not only external publishers, but O'Reilly books themselves! I also had a lot of problems reading Manning books in their app.
Rendering e-books properly is a pretty big table-stake thing.
> Personally, I'd love a website that can provide all the ebooks oreilly provides. But it needs to work on a tablet.
Can't you just download pirated copies as a pdf or epub and read them on any device? It feels much more convenient than using a shitty DRM app, and if you have ethical concerns nothing's stopping you from still paying for a subscription while doing that.
Their app has drastically improved since it first came out, IMO.
If you are in Bay area, San Francisco Public Library (sfpl.org) gives you access to O'Reilly for free, if you have library card, while it does not improve on usability issues, at 0 cost it is phenomenal resource.
Seattle Public Libraries (spl.org) also provides no-cost access to the O'Reilly Complete collection as a membership benefit.
Support your local public library!
My two problems with access through libraries is lack of app access, and that every time I login, all my progress is gone (not reset to cover - gone gone), and I have to find the resource again, open it and go to the page/time I was at. Also can’t create my own playlist or favorites.
At least my library acts like that.
Same for SFPL. Majorly annoying.
I already have a San Francisco Public Library card because it gives me access to some very useful archives, but I had no idea that I could access O'Reilly as well. Thanks for mentioning this!
You can quite often get a $300 yearly sub to O'Reilly, they run a discount ~4 times a year.
That said, like a lot of other content subscriptions, it can be quite anxiety inducing to make it seem like you're getting your money's worth. I've gotten the sub via my work, and I think the labs and videos are quite good, plus the occasional opportunities to do live-chats with the authors. But you have to sift through a lot of content and dedicate a lot of hours to use them. For most folks, I think buying a few technical books a year as needed would be a much better use of time and money.
Also check if you're in education at any level. Most university libraries subscribe to what used to be Safari and you can SSO the full (enormous) catalogue. I didn't realize this for quite a long time as it's not widely advertised. There are ton of books that aren't the traditional animal-drawing tech titles, including Manning, as well as some lecture series.
But the app is pretty kludgey and it's way more locked down than other publishers who will give you chapter PDFs.
At least it's a good way to skim books to see if they're worth buying a physical copy.
My university library has dropped their subscription, and they're pointing us at the local public library which still has it, for the moment.
At one time I worked at a research institute. It had a huge library that was only partially filled. One of the directors wanted to buy every developer their own Safari subscription. The cost was quoted at around $4K/mo IIRC.
I pointed out that it would be far more cost–effective to simple let us request hard copies of whatever books we wanted, and then they would just stay in the library. No one worked remotely at the time.
We ended up getting Safari subscriptions for everyone.
It’s capex vs. opex. A large enough company has a fixed budget for both, and for your situation, I assume that the opex budget had the funds, while the capex did not.
This separation and other accounting peculiarities like use it or lose it budgeting cause so much inefficiency.
Maybe it's just some peculiarity I'm missing, but wouldn't a smaller capex sum be a pareto improvement over a larger opex? Is there any way in which denying the suggestion was rational?
Yes, spending less money is better than spending more money (though there can be potential tax treatment differences or other complexities depending on exactly how money is spent), but that doesn't mean the person in charge of approving an employee's expense is authorized to approve expenses however they please. If they're given a budget that says they get X money in one category and Y money in another, they can't spend (X-2Z, Y+Z) and can only choose to spend (X,Y) or deny the request. Big organizations often have a lot of inefficiencies due to process.
To be clear, my question was about whether there is a situation where it is rational from a management accounting perspective to define a unit's budget like this.
Imagine you own a factory that makes plastic widgets. The factory has a widget-making machine.
You'll pay rent on the factory and interest on the loan you took out to buy the widget-making machine whether you make one widget or a million. But the amount you'll spend on plastic and machine operator wages goes up the more widgets you want to make.
So you can plot a line, y=mx+c where y is the amount you spend and x is the number of widgets you make. m is the cost of plastic and worker wages, c is the cost of rent and loan interest. (Obviously this is a simplification)
You would carefully monitor the per-unit costs of plastic and machine operator wages - but if you've got a machine that turns 10 cents of plastic into a $1 widget, the more plastic you put in the more profit you make. Only an idiot would try to save money by refusing to buy plastic.
On the other hand, if you need to take out a loan to buy plastic, that's an ominous sign indeed - because the previous batch of widgets should have sold at a profit, giving you all the cash needed to buy the plastic for the next batch.
Business is going great, in fact you're running your widget-making machine at full capacity, and you decide to buy a second one - which is an almighty expense, but definitely a sensible one. If you accounted for this the same way you account for plastic, your accounts would look crazy - you were making decent profit every year, then you suddenly took a 800% loss one year? - so instead this is shown in a separate place in the accounts.
Obviously, you do want to invest in new machines when it's profitable to do so - but if you have to delay the purchase by a few months, it's not the end of the world. And taking out a loan to buy the machine could be reasonable.
So basically operating expenses (plastic) and capital expenses (new machines) are paid for differently, managed differently, and accounted for differently.
Of course if you don't operate a widget factory, the distinctions and the reasons for them might be a lot less clear.
> If you accounted for this the same way you account for plastic, your accounts would look crazy
This is purely a problem if you have to get a loan or something. If you’re the sole owner of the business, you can count money the normal way, since it’s all the same money to you. I.e. you don’t have to spend silly amounts on renting when owning is actually cheaper.
Did you just write a short lesson to explain the difference between capex and opex? Well... thank you, I guess.
But again, the question is: is it ever rational for a functional unit manager to be given a particular maximum opex budget and not be allowed to capitalize a part of that? What benefit would such a restriction offer to the business?
> What benefit would such a restriction offer to the business?
You approve opex budget for the widget department because you know they can turn 10 cents of plastic into $1 of widgets, and you want them doing that in the forthcoming quarter. You're happy for them to spend a nigh-unlimited amount on inputs like plastic, so long as it's on things with a 90% margin.
But you don't want the department head spending their nigh-unlimited budget on things that don't get sold on with a 90% margin. So you don't let them charge the O'Reilly books to the nigh-unlimited part of their budget.
Thanks, I see how this would make sense in general. But it does go against this particular case, no? L&D should probably be budgeted outside the widget COGS anyway, but assuming that the widget department has a single budget, and they're going to be using it for O'Reilly books anyway, is it still somehow rational to pay more for a subscription than less for owning the books? Is it just that that consider the extra accounting effort to be more expensive than dealing with the relatively small inefficiencies?
I've worked in similar scenarios and advocated for the Safari subscription. The most obvious problem with the physical book solution is that not everyone can read the same book at the same time. In my experience it's very common that, because some topic is particularly relevant for the team, many people will want to read the same book. At the same time, you do not want 30 copies of a book that was read by everyone 3 years ago sitting on the shelf.
And, as far as expenses go for a research institute, $4k/mo is very inexpensive.
I get the O’Reilly subscription through the ACM. It’s an extra $75 a year after a regular ACM membership. A lot less than $500/year.
For a while, the O'Reilly subscription was included in the $99/yr ACM membership. Then they stopped offering O'Reilly for a bit. Then they brought it back as part of the $75 skills add-on.
I feel like this is a little known secret (discount via ACM) that more folks should know about. Hopefully this post helps spread the word.
For those curious about the ACM membership: https://www.acm.org/membership/membership-options
> ACM is pleased to share an important milestone for the computing field. Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library will be made open access.
Doesn’t help for O'Reilly content.
(Also, if you can afford the subscription money it makes sense to reward, not punish, ACM for making its own material open-access.)
Is this ACM membership worth it?
If your paying $500 for an O’Reilly subscription, then the $99 membership plus $75 add-on for O'Reilly would seem to make it so even if you don't use any of the other facilities:
> unlimited access to ACM's collection of thousands of online books, video courses, interactive sandboxes, practice labs, and AI-enabled tools from O'Reilly and Skillsoft Percipio
> I get the O’Reilly subscription through the ACM.
I get it through my library:
* https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDMEDB00...
Every year O'Reilly has a cybermonday disccount of 40%. https://www.oreilly.com/online-learning/2025-cyber-sale.html...
One year, many years ago, they had an Cyber Monday offer for $299 indefinitely. I took it.
Reading this and thinking of my consumption I start wondering if it is still worth it
I don’t think you get the same level of access though? I tried an O’Reilly subscription directly then went the ACM route and remember being disappointed that it was a more limited subscription.
Does anyone know if Springer has any subscription discounts, access via library, etc? ACM does not include Springer.
I do this too. It was a easy sell to my department
I just checked, and I've had an O'Reilly account since March of 2014 without major interruption, back when it was called Safari. It is by far the best source for high quality tech content out there. There is so much filler content in tech blogs, that I'm happy to pay to get access to high quality.
I must be on some grandfathered plan though, as I'm not paying near $500/year. That is a very steep price.
Same. Mine is grandfathered in price from long ago. I couldn't work without it, although LLMs are becoming a good substitute for some subjects. The mobile app is a roach motel though.
What are you paying?
$199/year. I think it is worth that, but I don't think I'd pay much more.
My account is from 2007ish and even cheaper. I just hope there won't ever be a problem with my yearly payment because obviously they won't reopen it on old terms.
Well, it's good business for them and for me. I can access books when it comes to my mind (not that often). They get the money. I would certainly never subscribe again at current rates.
I also pay $200/year, well worth the cost for me.
As another data point, I'm on an old plan for $199/year.
I'm grandfathered in at $200/year from the Safari days. The main advantage of the subscription to me is being able to evaluate several books on a topic to pick the one that is the best fit for what I need.
If I knew which books were best in category, it would be cheaper for me to just buy those specific books (or video courses, for things like Blender).
But if I had to pay the current $500 price, I wouldn't be a subscriber.
Agreed, I'm also on a $200/year plan and for me too the fact that I can skim multiple books on a single topic before settling on one is well worth the money.
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.
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.
When I was consuming close to a book a month, I thought it was pretty well worth it.. it's hard to justify otherwise. Before Amazon got big, I would browser B&N/Borders etc. for technical books and it was nice... even after Amazon, I remember driving across town for a book that I kind of needed before the weekend for a project.
Amazon then became my main go-to... then more blog articles and technical posts became prevalent... StackOverflow grew to similar dominance. Now, I buy a handful of books for my Kindle a couple times a year and may or may not get through them. I'm more inclined to just read online docs, search or even look at AI results than read through books. I miss dead tree books, but the space and moving them kinda sucks. Not to mention, that even with glasses the text is a bit hard for me now.
I'm still an avid tech reader, just more blogs and less books... I used to tear through 500-800 pages on a typical weekend. After 3 decades in this career, I'm a bit more inclined to veg out in front of the TV.
> Unfortunately, I cannot read technical books fast and definitely not fast enough to make the subscription be worth $500 per year.
For me I find the $500 to be a pretty clear win as far as value goes. My shelves are already overflowing with, while not "timeless", much slower aging technical books. But quite often, throughout a year, I'll want a deeper dive into a current topic than I can get from online resources + Claude. Quite often that dive involves wanting to look through multiple books (even if only using a few chapters).
I know I'm a dying breed, but, while I love AI for interactive exploration and learning, I find books more valuable in the era of endless YouTube tutorials and AI slop blog posts. Technical topics benefit from "big picture" thinking that basically doesn't exist in modern short-form web content.
Books still activate a different part of the brain than reading on a screen, including e-ink, so it's not you or a dying breed, people may turn out to not learn as deeply or as quickly.
I had kinda suspected this just based on my own experience of paper vs screen, but hadn’t run across any research.
After seeing your comment I went looking! I found this interesting: https://phys.org/news/2024-02-screens-paper-effective-absorb...
That was one of the studies that I saw too.
There's some others about learning more from writing with pen on paper compared to tablet or taking notes digitally typing.
I am a digital note taker at heart but can't deny using a notebook still has better outcomes sometimes.
Probably true but I'm not going to lug 10 textbooks onto a plane.
For sure, that would be a backpack that is too big as a carry on.
I get it through my public library.
The app is unusable. I have a subscription available to me. I try to use it from time to time. The app is unusable.
You can use the web.
Every library I've had a library card for (Toronto Public Library 7ish years ago, and BANQ Montréal) have had O'reilly subscriptions for free! A few other people have mentioned it in this thread with specific cities, but check your local one! It seems really common.
Vancouver Public Library as well :) https://www.vpl.ca/digital-library/oreilly-technology-and-bu...
Though I wish I could check them out on my Kobo...
I signed up many years ago when they had 50% off and then was allowed to renew at the same price. Made it very difficult to cancel, knowing that I will have to pay full price if I ever want it back, but one year I looked at how much I had paid in total for reading those books and decided to cancel anyway.
Great site though. I never used the app, but mobile browser support was not bad.
Paid for it to read computer books, and did a lot of that, but also discovered much else. They also had (have?) courses and paid video presentation. I noticed one series of videos I watched there would have cost more to watch legally than I paid for an entire year of O'Reilly.
I've concluded exactly the same! It's far more cost effective to buy individual books than paying for the subscription. Hard copies can also be sold if I decide not to keep them, which offsets costs even more
I used to sell things on amzn back in the day. Despite that good karma, one is required now to submit to a body cavity search to sell.
> Unfortunately, I cannot read technical books fast and definitely not fast enough to make the subscription be worth $500 per year.
Reading is never about being fast at doing it.
If you don't want to read a book, read it fast.
I read technical material faster than non-technical at about 900 WPM, and with excellent retention. Some people just read fast.
I'm genuinely baffled by the amount of people here who actually use those proprietary DRM book apps. I understand paying for the subscription to support the authors/publisher, but surely you can just pay for a subscription and then still download the books as DRM-free pdfs/epubs? Is there a single reason to use those publisher apps?
I had the option to get a membership that I could expense through my work, but decided against it after the trial period ended.
The reason was entirely the terrible state of their app.
- Random crashes, or times when it would not start up at all.
- Text to speech is unusable because it cannot start reading at a specific point. Only at the beginning.
- Cannot download epub to use with a different (better) epub reader.
So even though it would not cost me anything, I realized I would never use it due to the issues with their app.
I have O'Reilly subs available both from my employer and my local library. Doesn't fix the UI issues but does at least shift the ROI calculus.
There are some applications that try to export O'Reilly books into Kindle formats, but every time I've tried they've mangled a few tables, formulas or sidebars, etc. I should probably sell or hand down my kindle and find something more suitable to O'Reilly.
I have figured that I’m going to get exactly one CS hobby that is not work, and 0 CS hobby if I can find a job that fits the hobby.
Then I figured there are less than ten books that I need to read, and probably less if I can get such a job because it is always a lot better to learn on the job.
So I agree with the author that such subscription is not very useful, and a paper book + a paper notepad are way better than reading books on a tablet.
Yeah, I agree about the O'Reilly app. It's pretty bad, so I'm actually thinking about just getting the book instead of using their app.
O'Reilly's mobile app is always a moment of zen: You open it to read a book to enhance your professional skills, but alas, the app is obviously poorly written despite being created by people in your profession (who seem to have not read the books?)
Anyway, the web experience has been pretty good for a while, so I use that now.
$500/year?? Wow, I get it free as a military veteran. I still use it via browser at work quite often.
> will most likely not make me renew my subscription for the new year. Given the price, it will be probably
Will the author find the time and energy to actually cancel the subscription? The fact that he wrote the blog post and still haven’t cancelled makes me wonder.
I just terminated my 8-years O'Reilly subscription this year. I was at $400/year and realized I cannot make full use of it recently.
But I just joined Manning subscription this winter to see if it helps.
(From my experience) O'reilly is very responsive and open to direct feedback less to rants on the net, I think you should use their contact channels and send feedback :-)
https://annas-archive.org
Lately I just ask an LLM to teach me things interactively. It will be interesting to see if that stops working so well, when authors stop writing books for LLMs to absorb. Maybe as long as there is some kind of canonical reference, the LLM can bridge the gap to decent educational material. If so, that's kind of sad, but also kind of awesome at the same time. It's definitely an interesting time to be alive. I wish I was just a little closer to retirement, though...
Disrupt the subscriptions hoax.
Buy the books! Even better: physical, paper books. They are a pleasure to read
In my country, it's cost-prohibitive to buy technical books (except the most popular ones like DDIA / JCIP).
I got offered a initial O'Reilly subscription of $200 / year - just last week ....
For me one of the best ways until now to get good quality IT books is (believe it or not): Humble Bundle (https://www.humblebundle.com/)
The past year they featured bundles from (quickly out of my head): O'Reilly, MIT Press, Manning, Pearson, Pragmatic Programmers and No Starch Press.
Oh, and Packt. But I left that one out because the quality of most Packt books is total shit (IMO).
It's the next best thing besides going on the seven seas if you want to reliably read IT related books on a ereader without spending a ton of money. (book bundles go for about $20 to $30 each, with most if of not all of them totaling up to $1000 or sometimes even more in value).
If you're fast there's still time to get these right now:
15 Linux/DevOps related books from O'Reilly: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/linux-from-beginner-to-pr...
20 Data Science/Data Engineering related books from O'Reilly: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/data-engineering-science-...
18 Hacking/Cybersec related books from No Starch: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/hacking-no-starch-books
19 Software Architecture related books from Pearson: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/software-architecture-pea...
29 AI related books from Manning: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/ultimate-ai-algorithms-an...
21 Microsoft Certification prep books from Pearson: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/microsoft-certification-p...
19 books on Software Strategy and Risk Management from Pragmatic Programmers: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/software-strategy-and-ris...
I was once asked to review a Packt book on a subject I knew well. Not only did it contain many factual errors, I wasn't allowed to point them out for correction - they rejected those suggestions. As I recall they wanted my free labor just to review presentation and basically rubber stamp it.
Have never bought from Packt since.
I used to buy almost every single one of their bundle, but at some point I got a feeling they started repeating with different bundle titles.
Fanatical also has tech book bundles.
Packt books are pure shit.
Back when I subscribed to O'Reilly I had a bookmark set up to search there with Packt excluded. Otherwise no matter what I searched for the results were clogged up with Packt-slop.
I think this is precisely the Packt strategy though - to always overwhelm the search results, whether its O'reilly, Amazon, etc. They do this by their sheer volume of low quality titles. Everything about that company and their content is complete shit.
I would have more respect for O’Reilly if they didn’t include them then.
Manning wins points for giving me DRM free books and for their website. It's really nice and I like reading the books on it. So much so that I wish I could sync pdfs to the Web progress.
Good job Manning!
I hate the UX of O'reilly. Great books, but horrible HX. That company seems to have people who do not dogfood.
there is an O'Reilly plan for public libraries which is dope and accessible to those less privileged to afford premium access.
I agree O'Reilly is way too expensive.
I work for a publishing company that sells elearning access to the proprietary “framework”. Anyways our company is now going full bore on AI related content. Everyone is just milling about having meetings about our AI product line but the company is sinking.
We don’t focus any effort on our core services and product, just chase the next fad.
If other publishing companies are anything like the one I work for then they’re clawing at the wall looking for the next big thing. Since AI is a big question mark, they are publishing absolute drivel.
Do folks have opinions on the quality of the recent books? Last one I picked up was not good (good chance it is partially AI slop).
Read online (and not in the app), but the copy-editing did not do it any favors, and then how code snippets were formed broke the simple copy/paste (used icons for line breaks that could have been avoidable).
> where I can get O’Reilly books without DRM and keep them beyond any subscription limit
... and this way they'll own the books ...
their UX is terrible. any decent PDF reader beats it. no more for me as well.
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The big name companies in tech are mostly extractive nightmares including FAANG. Orielly is the least of our problems.