I find subscriptions to be a mixed bag. For something like TV/Movies subscription makes sense in general. Most consumers will watch once and then watch something else and this subscription rental service is cheaper than direct buying what you would use.

With technical books, this is a pretty hard sell at the Safari prices. The lowest cost option is $39/month for one user. It's pretty difficult to justify that as I need to read a minimum of one technical book per month, and all of those books would have to be ones available in Safari.

I've used Safaribooks in the past because an employer paid for the team, and I thought it was quite good, but it isn't good enough to replace all of my technical book needs, nor is it worth $39/month.

I, like the parent, have directly purchased quite a few books directly from O'Reilly online in the past. The nice thing was that unlike Amazon I could count on updates if there were corrections and such. Now I will just look elsewhere for books and O'Reilly just loses my money.

Also; IMHO, the O'Reilly article is nothing but PR spin. How is this reinventing anything? Safaribooks has been around for 16 years as a subscription service. There is nothing new here; all they did was kill off a sales channel. That's pretty much the opposite of invention.

I don't mind subscriptions, but a key difference between O'Reilly's subscription model and Adobe/Jetbrains is that my Jetbrains and Adobe subscriptions (both of which I'm happy with!) get me access to the exact same thing I used to pay hundreds of dollars a year for, just on different terms.

Safari is quite radically different from the O'Reilly products I used to pay for. I'm forced to use a browser or their proprietary mobile app to read the books. Only the mobile app support offline reading. It's a completely different value proposition - it costs much more than I would normally spend on O'Reilly ebooks each year, but it would get me access to many more tech books than I'd normally buy or read. Unlike ebook purchases, if I stop subscribing I lose access to everything.

I think it ends up being a good value if you reference a wide variety of books and a very poor one if you have narrower interests. I'd be more interested if they offered a plan that fit my usage profile. I don't care about access to thousands of books with no restrictions, I'd be happy to have access to maybe two to four full books (of my choosing) at a time for a more modest monthly fee. Maybe a credits system like Audible? I think there's a lot of ways to design an ebook subscription service that are more customer-friendly than forcing everyone into an expensive all-or-nothing choice.

For me it was even worse, their mobile app's cache would bork fairly frequently, and the app would misbehave until I cleared it, and on android, it isn't exactly an accessible option, you have to go through layers of settings menus, scroll forever for the app you're looking for to finally clear it. Third time it happened, I cancelled my Safari account.

I want to like Safari as an option, but it's way too limited for me. Frankly I'm only buying 2-3 books a year now, mostly relying on technical articles or online documentation (bad as that may be). I may go through another burst reading 8-10 books over a summer again, but not at the moment.

Although this change doesn't affect me, I mostly bought print books via Amazon anyway, because I find digital copies harder to recall/work through.

I agree with you. I have a Safari subscription and I have mostly stopped buying computer science text books (I buy only 7 or 8 a year now). Now instead of looking on stack overflow or doing a web search, I login to Safari, find a recent book, and read the parts that are useful/interesting.

Same. When I got an email yesterday saying that my ACM membership now gives me complete access to the entire Safari platform and all its content, it was like the last several Christmases all wrapped up in one. Just extraordinary how much useful content just became available to me, and all searchable too. Amazing.

The subscription model makes sense for the vendors--I get that it costs money to put out new versions and support things.

For me, it depends on the "stuff" and its longevity. E.G. for JetBrains, I'd rather pay ~$600 once and for all, since I doubt I'll move off of it any time soon. Instead, to get updates, I'll now pay $299 per year in perpetuity (after yr 2). So if I use it 10 more years, I plunk out almost $3000.

Even all the little junk adds up. $10 for Zoom, $12.50 for Slack, etc. etc. As a developer / consultant working in many different languages on a few platforms, I'm spending close to $2000 for subscriptions each year. It's a bit much.

Out of curiosity, do you use many pieces of software regularly that you last updated in 2007? Would you use IntelliJ 2007 for work today?

I don't know: $3k for ten years of updates to a key tool I use for work -- that seems low. Like, well below my budget for coffee.

$2k/yr total does seem high. That's higher than my costs for my various work-related subscriptions. But if that $2k provides tools you convert into 50x or 100x that in income... I mean, it seems like money well spent.

I too have an IntelliJ IDEA subscription and I'm happy to pay money for it BECAUSE if I stopped paying, in my case, the community edition is open source and good enough. I basically could do all of my work with the free version, yet I pay them because I want to see Jetbrains thriving. But if they'd drop the community edition, I'd drop IntelliJ IDEA like a hot potato.

As a developer I got the best value from open source tools. I like the feeling of control that gives.

I do pay for Fastmail and for Dropbox, because my email and data are very important. And a good laptop is a must and I like MacBooks.

But my general rule of thumb is that subscriptions have to give a 10x return of investment to be worth it. And I'm sorry, but most tools don't deliver. You're claiming a 50x-100x return, but that's ridiculous.

As a dev I could do all of my work on Linux, using completely open source tools and I can get by with completely free documentation or by reading source code. I know that because I've been doing it for the better part of my career.

Basically productivity has more to do with knowledge than with tools and I'm not talking of the superficial knowledge that you get from beginner books, but the kind that you get by working on hard problems, reading academic papers and doing deep dives in source code that isn't yours.

So seeing OReilly change their business model, after years of recommending them, well, I'm not a cow to be milked or their personal ATM.

It's honestly just a personal preference which model you prefer more. I can respect a business choosing either model, but ideally having both options is the best.