On 2017-06-28 Tim Lavoie wrote:
One question now though, can you still buy DRM-free eBooks? What you bought directly from them was unsoiled, but I think everything through Amazon or Kobo was DRM-infested.
I'll never buy digital from Amazon so I'm not sure, but I think that Az is DRM-only and can only be read with Kindle or an Az app or a specific Az web page (though I could be wrong). I'm sure some MUUGer has bought Az digital books and can enlighten us further.
(BTW, Kobo is tied to Indigo/Chapter's competing device/format, completely incompatible with Az's Kindle.)
Further to my other post, here's some more info on the ORM change:
Official explanation: (disappointed this isn't Tim writing this) https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/were-reinventing-too
Pages and pages of angry user comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14659462
Oh ya, and it seems that the biggest loss here is that never again can one get a PDF format ORM title. It's toast, kaput. I tried all the formats I could use to read my digitally-bought ORM titles and finally settled on using PDF exclusively as it's the only format I could stomach. The others just stunk when it came to layout/formatting and images/figures. And their page numbers never made any sense. With the PDF I knew I was looking at exactly what the printed book looked like. Only on my phone would I touch any other format (epub usually), because of limited screen space.
Final note, I guess MUUG *really* won't be getting any book or ebook donations from ORM ever again (not that we have for 2+ years now). And no more "user group discount". And I'm pretty sure this also does away with any future O'Reilly (and possibly sub-brands like No Starch!?) Humble Bundle like the two MUUG has bought already.
Hey, it could be worse, they could have announced they were discontinuing print books completely!!! (Knock on wood...)