(1) you can't read books in your browser while offline (2) many publishers don't contribute to Safari (Springer, MIT Press, etc) (3) publishers that are technically on Safari don't publish their whole catalog (Wiley) (4) Publishers that are on Safari, and do publish their whole catalog, may take months, a year even to put their books online (Wrox). (5) A lot of the books in the catalog are from Packt, which I consider noise.

So, while I do have Safari, I use it as a last resort and buy the DRM-free PDFs from publishers that have then (Manning, Prag Prog, etc) even if they are in Safari.

This past week, my account got corrupted. I lost about one years worth of Playlists that I put much effort into curating. All gone. Support was able to get me a CSV file of a known good state, but its going to be a PITA to manually recreate everything again. I might not bother.

That said, I can't fault them for having every publisher's catalog, since their focus seems to be on software and software-adjacent subjects. The publishers you mentioned have vast catalogs largely in areas outside of their sweet spot.

With regard to your account being corrupted, yikes -- I'm sorry that happened, and I can't say I'm super surprised. I've always found their playlists and "recently read" UI to be buggy to the point that I don't really bother much with it. For example, items "recently read" on their mobile app don't seem to sync with desktop/browser and vice versa.

I will also say that their recent embrace of dark patterns has been bumming me out -- aggressive marketing modals on login goading me into attending one of their live seminars, and breaking basic browser functionality (eg copy -- you can surprisingly copy text from inside books in SBO, but it will almost certainly be a bad time for you when you eventually try to paste it somewhere), among others.

I understand they’re was probably so much piracy it forced their hand (books being small files, easy to distribute).

According to the article people are scanning books now and uploading.. which I didn’t realize was happening.

There are a few sellers that sell you a un drm es books. Manning though puts a “licensed to ______” on each page in a attempt to make me not share.

It’s kinda a tragedy that behaving badly puts you at an advantage (free books more money for me) vs those that buy. There are people that legit can’t afford the books and it’s kinda nice to have that option.

The time I can spend every month for "extra" reading translates to roughly one book. For 49 USD a month, I could just buy the book secondhand every month (and even sell it further when done).

I would have happily paid 5 USD a month, but 49 USD, that's way too much for the value, for me.

I think Safari is close to the fitness gym upfront year plan. Are most people who subscribe really going to read $49 worth of their material per month?

I could imagine someone learning to code for the first time might find better value elsewhere with that $49 a month, but in my case I think that it works out.