The worst book I have bought in the past two years was O'Reilly's Building Node Applications with MongoDB and Backbone.
My quick, capsule review of that book: Piece of Shit. Bad example code, horrific continuity, next to no editing, it had everything needed to be lumped in with the crappy tech books. Ironically, the "Sam's Teach Yourself" Node.js book (which I had already gone through and was hoping to expand upon with the O'Reilly purchase) was vastly superior.
I wish I could get my money back, but I don't think Amazon does refunds for ebooks.
exactly the same can be said about their couchdb-book (first edition)
i have worse things to say about their "Data Source Handbook", the fact that they STILL sell it is unbelievable
but to be fair: the functionalJS book and DOM enlightenment (see http://domenlightenment.com) were quite decent. both books recommended.
There is a one-week window to return ebooks in the U.S.
2) I agree on this. I wrote it down to the spirit of "American optimism" that us Europeans can find a bit distasteful, and sometimes it just seems too self-serving, fanning the flames of this or that technological phenomenon in order to sell more books. However, that's his job, and at least he tries to bring some open debate on the topics rather than leaving big players to come out with The Next Big Thing on their own.
3) All O'Reilly eBooks get automatically synchronised to your Dropbox folder in pdf, ePub and Mobi, which I think is a fantastic story for mobile (could do with better Kindle integration I guess, but Amazon holds the keys to that particular kingdom). I've never used Safari tbh, I'm not a fan of subscriptions.
1: http://manning.com/ 2: http://pragprog.com/titles 3: http://www.apress.com/
It doesn't matter so much now, and it also only worked because O'Reilly was a small publisher who had the benefit of being able to be really picky about authors and subjects. It doesn't scale when you want to get a large number of books out on subjects where you may have very little choice in authors. How many people are qualified to write a book about [insert random 5 months old javascript library of the week]? Often it might be a handful of people, several of whom won't be interested and/or are bad writers.
1) It started producing mediocre books by the dozens. Gone are the days were the O'Reilly tomes (like the Perl books) were THE definitive books on a language.
2) It started promoting all sorts of half-though marketing/visionary crap (Thomas Friedman means Alvus Toffler style), on Open Source, Web 2.0 etc.
3) The Safari bookstore (which I was on and off subscriber over the years) had BS restrictions and a bad UI. I haven't even bothered to check if they provide a good tablet story nowadays.