Re:Why the Seattle Mystery Bookshop Must Close
by bamboozled on Sunday October 22, 2017 @06:25PM
(#15529340)
If publishers put out official-grade softcopy EPUBs — like O'Reilly used to do until recently — they'd be just as good as the same publisher's hardcopy prints.
Pragmatic programmers do this and it's an absolute joy to use their digital books, you can have ePub, Mobi or PDF format. The quality of their eBooks over that available from Amazon is much higher.
Re:Why the Seattle Mystery Bookshop Must Close
by kasey_junk on Sunday October 22, 2017 @09:31AM
(#15526742)
I think O'Reilly is fairly interesting because they were about the best case for non-DRM standards based ebooks. Their content was very time limited in value, customers were savvy, shouldn't be too price sensitive, and were 'saying' they wanted the unencumbered ebooks.
But the market didn't actually behave that way. They had trouble selling ebooks and piracy was a huge issue.
The next one to watch will be Tor. If they back off of their DRM free stance we'll know that its basically an untenable model.
If publishers put out official-grade softcopy EPUBs — like O'Reilly used to do until recently — they'd be just as good as the same publisher's hardcopy prints.
Side note: I really hate that I can't buy any EPUBs of O'Reilly's titles. I don't want a non-portable, non-saveable, online-only subscription; and their supported method of getting non-subscription digital copies are all on Amazon and Google Play Books, neither of which provide EPUBS and suffer from the same problems you highlight.