On 2017-06-28 Hartmut W Sager wrote:
Huh??? I am stunned! And, it's "as of today". No prior notice? What happened there so suddenly?
Ya, this stinks big time. I follow O'Reilly releases religiously and I caught nary a whiff of this before now.
I can kind of understand not wanting to ship physical books anymore, but to ditch digital book selling seems rather dumb. And not selling the videos anymore seems completely insane. I never really buy ebooks unless I need something *now*, so I don't care about them, but I did buy videos direct from their site semi-regularly, when they came up as deal of the week.
Amazon is fine for print, especially in the used marketplace, but I don't think I'll ever buy a digital anything from Amazon. So that means no more ORM videos for me :-(
Adam must be correct: ORM must have been pressured by Amazon. It would have cost ORM nothing to keep their excellent ebook and video digital content shop in place and just ditch the physical books. This move seems counterproductive. If Az really is punishing publishers/"competitors" then maybe it is time for Az to get hit with some anti-trust suits...
Or, their sales of digital were way down due to piracy, not sure how many people were abusing their non-DRM system. If you're reading this and have pirated ORM content, shame on you!
Safari doesn't strike me as a viable replacement for most people, especially the average joe home user. $399US/yr ($529CA) is pretty steep for most MUUGers I'm assuming. It's scaring me away, and I'm kind of their prime target (I consume ORM books by the dozen). If piracy was the problem, I can see how the Safari model will help monetize the casual pirates.
Other things that have changed:
1. Their individual book pages don't list a price, not even a cover price, anymore (screws up my want-list spreadsheet!!)
2. They got rid of their links to their "getsatisfaction" customer support forum, which I assume means they are deprecating it. However, my old bookmarks still work so go to: http://support.oreilly.com/oreilly/topics and complain directly to ORM, who I assume is still reading it (ORM has great employees who always helped there very promptly). There's already a topic made for this: "Bring back PDF ebooks".
3. Their "your account" section has dropped the "register print books" option. That means no discounts anymore on new edition upgrades. Worse, now we can't add new books to the existing list meaning we can use that site to track our entire collection anymore. Nor will we get notices from them when new editions or errata correction "updates" are released.
books - I thought Safari is an alternate browser.
Ya, ORM's Safari predates Apple stealing the word by many many years. I think ORM was doing Safari as early as the mid-90's?
All in all, quite disappointed with this move of theirs. Everyone should moan on their getsatisfaction page linked above.