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A comment on Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person conferences.

Re:Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person confe... by ansible on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @02:37PM (#22687216)
This is somewhat off-topic, but has anyone else been disappointed by O'Reilly's website these days?

I was disappointed to learn about them discontinuing the sale of individual ebooks, but sort of rolled with it by just buying them from another vendor.

Now it seems I can only sign up for online learning. What is that? Yes, I can start a free trial, but wouldn't it be nice to know what I might want to spend $500 USD per year on? What does O'Reilly actually have these days?

I'd prefer to save my free trial for when I'm moderately sure I'll want to stick with the service. If I don't even have an index of what's being offered, that really turns me away.

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Re:Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person confe... by kod on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @04:46PM (#22688356)
Get an ACM membership. It includes full access to oreilly books.
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Re:Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person confe... by blub on Thursday March 26, 2020 @02:39AM (#22691141)
You mean over Safari or as pdf?
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Re:Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person confe... by kod on Thursday March 26, 2020 @09:23AM (#22693303)
Safari
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Re:Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person confe... by Groxx on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @10:37PM (#22690383)
Content quality has also fallen off a cliff somewhere along the way (is Mt. Everest a cliff? I'm going to say yes). Tons of shovelware-equivalents filled with flaws and never being corrected even with years of errata submissions (I do however love that this is possible). And the video courses, oh boy those video courses...

In ye olden days they were a relatively reliable publisher. Now I won't even consider touching them unless I can find many reviews vouching for a book.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person confe... by ryansmccoy on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @03:54PM (#22687925)
They discount the subscription 50% on black friday.
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Re:Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person confe... by ansible on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @04:32PM (#22688252)
> They discount the subscription 50% on black friday.

And if I read a dozen node.js books a year, that would be fine. But if I just want to read the one or two Rust books coming out per year... it is not such a good value.

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Re:Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person confe... by ryansmccoy on Thursday March 26, 2020 @06:49PM (#22698790)
True, make sense. I like being able to search across a variety of books for specific things (i.e. AWS, Go, React, etc) and some of the videos are pretty good. Also, I still buy a lot of books and being able to go through them before I buy them is really nice.
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Re:Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person confe... by unethical_ban on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @02:53PM (#22687357)
They don't sell ebooks anymore?
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Re:Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person confe... by ansible on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @02:57PM (#22687386)
Not individual ebooks directly from O'Reilly. I used to do that. But they've pushed the Safari initiative, and gone wholly on the subscription route.
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Re:Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person confe... by ilamont on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @03:24PM (#22687662)
They also forced some publishers off the platform, even if they participated in Safari.
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Re:Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person confe... by lovehashbrowns on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @08:27PM (#22689798)
Do you know which publishers they pushed off the platform?
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Re:Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person confe... by ilamont on Thursday March 26, 2020 @12:30PM (#22695254)
My company, for one.

The letter I received was a form letter which leads me to believe others were impacted, too:

We periodically review our partnerships and titles made available through our online learning platform, to ensure appropriate diversification, topic coverage, and audience fit. The learning platform customer base is rapidly evolving and growing, which means the learning resources we offer our customers must as well.

I'm writing today to let you know that while we have greatly appreciated your ongoing partnership with O’Reilly we have made the decision to not renew the contract for the distribution of XXXX content in the O’Reilly learning platform effective XXXX.

[ Parent | on HN ]