Anytime I'm asked for feedback via the O'Reilly website (I manage the business account for my company), the first thing I always say is that the app is unusable. I've tried it on my Amazon Fire Tablet, Ipad, different phones - it doesn't work.
The user metrics in O'reilly (and probably most learning apps) has floored in the last 12 months. I see they've launched a new AI platform now. They're definitely going in a direction - time will tell if it's the right one.
Personally, I'd love a website that can provide all the ebooks oreilly provides. But it needs to work on a tablet.
whenc 11 hours ago [-]
It went un-noticed here, I think, but The Pragmatic Bookshelf recently fired most of its staff and are taking on no new books. In the email they sent to authors, they quoted a 40% YoY fall in non-fiction sales, industry-wide.
roadside_picnic 8 hours ago [-]
As an avid reader (and sometimes writer) of technical books, it's sad to see the, perhaps inevitable, decline of the space. I still remember in the early 2000s Barnes and Noble would still have massive shelf space devoted to every technical topic you could imagine. I could spend hours just exploring what languages and topics there were I didn't even know existed. Powell's Technical Books used to be an entire separate store filled with books on every technical topic imaginable.
The publishing industry veterans I've worked with told me it was even more incredible during the height of the dotcom boom: book sales in the 100,000 copy range was not that rare.
Today I can only think of two truly technical book stores that still exist: The MIT Press Bookstore in Cambridge, MA and Ada Books in Seattle, WA. The latter, while a delightful store, has relegated the true technical book section to the backroom, which unfortunately doesn't seem to get refreshed too often (though, part of the beauty of this is it still has many of the weird old technical books that used to be everywhere).
rr808 1 hours ago [-]
> told me it was even more incredible during the height of the dotcom boom
I was a developer in the 90s before Netscape even came out. I didn't have a computer at home and dialup barely existed. If you wanted to do computer stuff you had to read. If you wanted to try a library you had to buy a CD from a bookstore or mail in an order which would get posted to you.
marai2 3 hours ago [-]
Same with the Stanford university bookstore. Was one of the better bookstores in the Bayarea. Used to have a whole room of technical, science, math books. It too is a shadow of its former self. So sad.
rmason 4 hours ago [-]
I too am avid reader and was visiting five local bookstores on a weekly basis. Several of them had huge areas stocked with tech books. I had tried Amazon maybe six months after it launched and bought there sporadically. But almost any book i sought was available locally and the savings weren't worth the convenience of purchasing locally.
Then in a three month period in late Spring 2000 all the programming books disappeared. Then my choice was between Amazon with quick delivery and the local store with a slower delivery and a higher price. So been buying from Amazon ever since and I can't remember the last time I have visited a bookstore.
seg_lol 6 hours ago [-]
The UW bookstore in Seattle like many big science schools had a wondrous technical book section. Isles of Springer. The bookstore itself is a shadow of its former shelf.
zdragnar 5 hours ago [-]
My own college experience heavily soured me on both book stores and especially school run book stores. The markup was obscene and their buy back rates were worse.
Half price books and a few other book stores lulled me back a few times, but nonfiction books are kept around mostly as eye candy at this point.
bsder 4 hours ago [-]
All the US universities outsourced their bookstores.
Now I can't even walk in and browse what books the various departments are using for classes, anymore. Everything is now behind bars and completely inaccessible.
3 hours ago [-]
6 hours ago [-]
senderista 5 hours ago [-]
Ada's these days is more about politics than technology.
zx8080 4 hours ago [-]
What kind of politics? I mean, what do they sell, little to no tech books?
jayde2767 5 hours ago [-]
Weird, I have honestly never walked into a Barnes and Noble and had satisfaction with any of their technical content on the shelf. That pleasure died when we lost Borders.
*Edit: spell correct kills me!
aksss 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah, peak experience for me was when our town had both a Borders and B&N offering huge tech book sections. Then Borders closed. Then B&N became a toy store.
Mistletoe 4 hours ago [-]
This makes sense, "enough" of the old technical info is in the AI brains now and easily accessed via a query.
TheOtherHobbes 3 hours ago [-]
A lossy compressed version of it, at least.
But a lot of is also in blogs and (video) tutorials. As well as Stack Overflow.
And all very searchable.
The old brick-of-paper approach to tech manuals just isn't a thing any more. I don't particularly miss it.
It was, if you think about, usually a slow and inefficient way to present information - often better at presenting what was possible than how to do make it happen.
dehrmann 2 hours ago [-]
Sibling comments are mostly saying they either started hoarding books or switched to some combination of blog posts, Stackoverflow, and LLMs. For those with books, how are you using them?
uxcolumbo 8 hours ago [-]
That's a shame. I got an email from them suggesting that they had a tough year.
I bought 2 books even though I won't have time to read them anytime soon.
Hopefully they'll find a way to keep going.
adamors 11 hours ago [-]
Wow, would be interested to read more about this, could you submit the email maybe as its own post? Even as a text version, I actually love the PragProg, would hate to seem them gone (but I guess it’s a foregone conclusion).
cultofmetatron 8 hours ago [-]
I love pragprog but I think nonfiction books in dead tree form is going away. YEs, I know there are people who will pay for a physical book, just not enough to make for a profitable business.
I myself spend around 200-300 usd on books every year. but I haven't bought a physical book in almost a decade. a pdf is perfectly fine. just sell it to me without DRM and have content thats worth the premium over wading through blogs.
How can these companies move forward and update their business model? Personally, I pay for manning's subscription. $24/month all you can eat. I would love more of these publishers switching to a netflix style model.
I consume a lot of short form technical content via blogs. would love a site where I can find medium written content with editorial oversight and quality control for technical correctness. obviously this costs money and it would be worth it to pay for that. I already do with manning. most of the content I consume are MEAPS. bleeding edge stuff that would likely be out of date by the time it makes it to dead paper form.
This would be advantageous to the publishers as well. this shifts the focus to put the content on the web and mobile in ways that are easy to access. The publishers also get data on what gets consumed informing what technical resources to commission.
fluorinerocket 6 hours ago [-]
I on the other hand can't stand PDFs.
They take up valuable screen space, it is annoying to scroll to the sections you need.
Yeah yeah some PDFs have the side navigation thing. Most don't
With a book I can put in those little flags to bookmark sections, I can easily riffle the pages and scan for the chapter I need, I can hand write in the margins
I often need 2 or 3 books open to different sections, I like keeping them on my desk so I can glance at them when I need to
I've probably cracked $1000 spent on books this year.
diab0lic 2 hours ago [-]
I’m similar to you. I recently went as far as to buy a pdf for an out of print book and then paid to have it printed and bound.
I suppose a remarkable would be another route but… they are pricey.
whenc 11 hours ago [-]
...
sevenseacat 11 hours ago [-]
I don't think this was supposed to be public knowledge.
whenc 11 hours ago [-]
Out of an abundance of caution, I've deleted it. So there we are.
aspenmayer 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tjr 11 hours ago [-]
Is this because people seek knowledge from LLMs rather than from books now?
Or is it because LLMs know everything that is in books, so people don't feel compelled to learn any more themselves?
AlotOfReading 11 hours ago [-]
Definitely isn't the latter. Numerical Recipes and Hacker's Delight have tons of gems that you won't get from an LLM, or that an LLM will even understand despite appearing all their training sets.
roadside_picnic 8 hours ago [-]
Even before LLMs became big I started hording solid technical books, as there was so much misinformation on Google/SO that any non-trivial technical question could not be answer without a high probability that the answer was fundamentally wrong.
LLMs are super helpful for learning, but without the foundation of a true textbook at your side they will very easily go off the rails into a world of imagination.
keithnz 7 hours ago [-]
even before LLMs you could/can get a lot of info on the web. Most ideas presented in books exist on the internet somewhere, quite a few pass through HN. In the 90s and early 2ks I used to hoard books, but now, not so much, I get a few through my library these days but a lot of times I just find the book is padded out to be a book and the meaty bit of the book is usually tiny.
kevstev 6 hours ago [-]
I also find that docs have gotten a lot better over time as well. I feel that Y2K era of numerous large tomes was largely to fill in the gap left after software publishers stopped shipping even their full price boxed software with meaty manuals, assuming I guess that help menus and GUI context (or maybe even Clippy) would get you there. Even some of the enterprisey software- Oracle comes to mind- would ship with like 6-10 volumes of reference information but very little in the way of a getting started guide that showed you how to get basic stuff up and running or what best practices were.
The web got a little better, and what drove brainshare and usage was a good experience getting started with reasonable defaults and good docs to get you started. API design is also much better these days- I was trying to find some examples of how unintuitive say MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes- big in the win9x days) apis were, but a lot of those docs seem to have disappeared- here is a stackoverflow/experts-exchange links that show how non-intuitive it was: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3255207/window-handle-in...https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/10018203/How-to-g...
Motif on the Unix side of things was a bit better, but not much. You really needed a good book to walk you through things in a more understandable way.
falcor84 11 hours ago [-]
Another option might be that people are increasingly using LLMs to write the books.
phantasmish 4 hours ago [-]
This is it. I know of too many companies (in nonfiction, specifically) trying to offload as much as possible to LLMs, damn the quality. Zero chance I buy any nonfiction written after 2021 or so unless it comes with strong recommendations from sources I trust. No more on-a-whim purchases because something looks interesting and is on sale or whatever. That’s over.
riffic 11 hours ago [-]
loaded questions.
tjr 10 hours ago [-]
Maybe a bit depressing, but I'm not sure loaded. I was just talking to someone (in person!) a few days ago, who purported that online courses were basically dead, because people can learn from LLMs instead.
And then, it seems to be a real issue amongst some people to ask, "why should I learn X, when LLMs already know it?" Not unlike, "why should I learn to divide, when we have calculators?" but on a grander scale.
camdenreslink 7 hours ago [-]
My hypothesis is people will get burned out on this unguided learning via LLMs and still want some sort of curated/guided learning experience through material to understand some subject.
There is the problem of "I don't know what I don't know" that a course can solve for you. An LLM can sort of do that, but you have to take its word for it, and it does it pretty much strictly worse at the moment (but is much more flexible).
jcynix 5 hours ago [-]
> My hypothesis is people will get burned out on this unguided learning via LLMs [...]
I'm less optimistic. Already 20+ years ago many people complained if you pointed them to books which answered their questions in depth. The standard reply was "just tell me how to solve this particular problem" instead.
anticorporate 11 hours ago [-]
Honestly, I wonder how some of these publishers stay in business at all. I haven't written a book, but I've been a technical reviewer for friends who have been published with some of the larger technical publishers. Nobody was making money from the process. I do wonder if maybe they're just taking on too many titles and reaching saturation. Do we really need "The guide to making X on Y with Z" for every potential iteration?
falcor84 11 hours ago [-]
> Nobody was making money from the process.
From the people I know who wrote or co-wrote books, the way you make money is in future interview processes.
I don't know if they still do it, but when I interviewed for Google, they had a self-ranking system of how competent you are in each technology, and the only way to get the top score was phrased something like "I wrote the book on it (yes, an actual book)".
vittore 11 hours ago [-]
Anecdotal evidence, all books I bought this year were used.
bwahah4 11 hours ago [-]
The shelf life of technology books is shorter than it takes to read them. Most were notebooks of students quickly edited into a learning tool. Oh wow more Python recipes. Another introduction to C++!
The worlds moved on from valuing the latest DSL and additions to the Linux kernel. Just a fad marketed at GenX and older Millennials.
SaaS is something tech billionaires need to exist. It's not something humanity needs. Not at the scale of the 2010s ZIRP fueled mania, anyway. Employers were using subscriptions to O'Reilly as a perk. No budget for perks in the AI and economic austerity era.
Maps app, communication apps, media consumption are all most of the billions of smartphone users care about.
esafak 6 hours ago [-]
Your map- and communication apps are SaaS.
vittore 11 hours ago [-]
I don't use an app, I use website via SFPL proxy, and it works just fine on iPad Pro (12"), but bookmarks do not work, so you need to remember where you stopped to continue after re-login.
kulahan 7 hours ago [-]
I haven't used any O'Reilly products, but if your library offers any, you can probably access the product via libby, which works on a phone/tablet? Just a guess. Libby also supports sending the data to kindles, at least.
adfm 5 hours ago [-]
Their app has drastically improved since it first came out, IMO.
clumsysmurf 7 hours ago [-]
I agree wholeheartedly. The app is unusable and unstable. I had to delete collections from the web because they were getting corrupted in the app.
One thing I notice is that it simply does not render many code snippets well, especially when using the "page" (vs "continuous" scrolling). I don't get the impression they are doing QA on rendering quality. Not only external publishers, but O'Reilly books themselves! I also had a lot of problems reading Manning books in their app.
Rendering e-books properly is a pretty big table-stake thing.
vittore 11 hours ago [-]
If you are in Bay area, San Francisco Public Library (sfpl.org) gives you access to O'Reilly for free, if you have library card, while it does not improve on usability issues, at 0 cost it is phenomenal resource.
otterley 11 hours ago [-]
Seattle Public Libraries (spl.org) also provides no-cost access to the O'Reilly Complete collection as a membership benefit.
Support your local public library!
Goofy_Coyote 11 hours ago [-]
My two problems with access through libraries is lack of app access, and that every time I login, all my progress is gone (not reset to cover - gone gone), and I have to find the resource again, open it and go to the page/time I was at. Also can’t create my own playlist or favorites.
At least my library acts like that.
vittore 8 hours ago [-]
Same for SFPL. Majorly annoying.
kens 5 hours ago [-]
I already have a San Francisco Public Library card because it gives me access to some very useful archives, but I had no idea that I could access O'Reilly as well. Thanks for mentioning this!
gruntledfangler 12 hours ago [-]
At one time I worked at a research institute. It had a huge library that was only partially filled. One of the directors wanted to buy every developer their own Safari subscription. The cost was quoted at around $4K/mo IIRC.
I pointed out that it would be far more cost–effective to simple let us request hard copies of whatever books we wanted, and then they would just stay in the library. No one worked remotely at the time.
We ended up getting Safari subscriptions for everyone.
teddyh 11 hours ago [-]
It’s capex vs. opex. A large enough company has a fixed budget for both, and for your situation, I assume that the opex budget had the funds, while the capex did not.
thfuran 11 hours ago [-]
This separation and other accounting peculiarities like use it or lose it budgeting cause so much inefficiency.
falcor84 10 hours ago [-]
Maybe it's just some peculiarity I'm missing, but wouldn't a smaller capex sum be a pareto improvement over a larger opex? Is there any way in which denying the suggestion was rational?
thfuran 10 hours ago [-]
Yes, spending less money is better than spending more money (though there can be potential tax treatment differences or other complexities depending on exactly how money is spent), but that doesn't mean the person in charge of approving an employee's expense is authorized to approve expenses however they please. If they're given a budget that says they get X money in one category and Y money in another, they can't spend (X-2Z, Y+Z) and can only choose to spend (X,Y) or deny the request. Big organizations often have a lot of inefficiencies due to process.
falcor84 10 hours ago [-]
To be clear, my question was about whether there is a situation where it is rational from a management accounting perspective to define a unit's budget like this.
michaelt 5 hours ago [-]
Imagine you own a factory that makes plastic widgets. The factory has a widget-making machine.
You'll pay rent on the factory and interest on the loan you took out to buy the widget-making machine whether you make one widget or a million. But the amount you'll spend on plastic and machine operator wages goes up the more widgets you want to make.
So you can plot a line, y=mx+c where y is the amount you spend and x is the number of widgets you make. m is the cost of plastic and worker wages, c is the cost of rent and loan interest. (Obviously this is a simplification)
You would carefully monitor the per-unit costs of plastic and machine operator wages - but if you've got a machine that turns 10 cents of plastic into a $1 widget, the more plastic you put in the more profit you make. Only an idiot would try to save money by refusing to buy plastic.
On the other hand, if you need to take out a loan to buy plastic, that's an ominous sign indeed - because the previous batch of widgets should have sold at a profit, giving you all the cash needed to buy the plastic for the next batch.
Business is going great, in fact you're running your widget-making machine at full capacity, and you decide to buy a second one - which is an almighty expense, but definitely a sensible one. If you accounted for this the same way you account for plastic, your accounts would look crazy - you were making decent profit every year, then you suddenly took a 800% loss one year? - so instead this is shown in a separate place in the accounts.
Obviously, you do want to invest in new machines when it's profitable to do so - but if you have to delay the purchase by a few months, it's not the end of the world. And taking out a loan to buy the machine could be reasonable.
So basically operating expenses (plastic) and capital expenses (new machines) are paid for differently, managed differently, and accounted for differently.
Of course if you don't operate a widget factory, the distinctions and the reasons for them might be a lot less clear.
falcor84 3 hours ago [-]
Did you just write a short lesson to explain the difference between capex and opex? Well... thank you, I guess.
But again, the question is: is it ever rational for a functional unit manager to be given a particular maximum opex budget and not be allowed to capitalize a part of that? What benefit would such a restriction offer to the business?
michaelt 3 hours ago [-]
> What benefit would such a restriction offer to the business?
You approve opex budget for the widget department because you know they can turn 10 cents of plastic into $1 of widgets, and you want them doing that in the forthcoming quarter. You're happy for them to spend a nigh-unlimited amount on inputs like plastic, so long as it's on things with a 90% margin.
But you don't want the department head spending their nigh-unlimited budget on things that don't get sold on with a 90% margin. So you don't let them charge the O'Reilly books to the nigh-unlimited part of their budget.
DannyPage 12 hours ago [-]
You can quite often get a $300 yearly sub to O'Reilly, they run a discount ~4 times a year.
That said, like a lot of other content subscriptions, it can be quite anxiety inducing to make it seem like you're getting your money's worth. I've gotten the sub via my work, and I think the labs and videos are quite good, plus the occasional opportunities to do live-chats with the authors. But you have to sift through a lot of content and dedicate a lot of hours to use them. For most folks, I think buying a few technical books a year as needed would be a much better use of time and money.
joshvm 8 hours ago [-]
Also check if you're in education at any level. Most university libraries subscribe to what used to be Safari and you can SSO the full (enormous) catalogue. I didn't realize this for quite a long time as it's not widely advertised. There are ton of books that aren't the traditional animal-drawing tech titles, including Manning, as well as some lecture series.
But the app is pretty kludgey and it's way more locked down than other publishers who will give you chapter PDFs.
At least it's a good way to skim books to see if they're worth buying a physical copy.
tombert 12 hours ago [-]
I get the O’Reilly subscription through the ACM. It’s an extra $75 a year after a regular ACM membership. A lot less than $500/year.
thesurlydev 11 hours ago [-]
For a while, the O'Reilly subscription was included in the $99/yr ACM membership. Then they stopped offering O'Reilly for a bit. Then they brought it back as part of the $75 skills add-on.
I feel like this is a little known secret (discount via ACM) that more folks should know about. Hopefully this post helps spread the word.
fruitplants 59 minutes ago [-]
Does anyone know if Springer has any subscription discounts, access via library, etc? ACM does not include Springer.
> ACM is pleased to share an important milestone for the computing field. Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library will be made open access.
layer8 11 hours ago [-]
Doesn’t help for O'Reilly content.
leoc 2 hours ago [-]
(Also, if you can afford the subscription money it makes sense to reward, not punish, ACM for making its own material open-access.)
aaaaaaron 12 hours ago [-]
Is this ACM membership worth it?
helsinkiandrew 11 hours ago [-]
If your paying $500 for an O’Reilly subscription, then the $99 membership plus $75 add-on for O'Reilly would seem to make it so even if you don't use any of the other facilities:
> unlimited access to ACM's collection of thousands of online books, video courses, interactive sandboxes, practice labs, and AI-enabled tools from O'Reilly and Skillsoft Percipio
11 hours ago [-]
throw0101a 11 hours ago [-]
> I get the O’Reilly subscription through the ACM.
One year, many years ago, they had an Cyber Monday offer for $299 indefinitely. I took it.
Reading this and thinking of my consumption I start wondering if it is still worth it
leejoramo 11 hours ago [-]
I do this too. It was a easy sell to my department
AlexB138 12 hours ago [-]
I just checked, and I've had an O'Reilly account since March of 2014 without major interruption, back when it was called Safari. It is by far the best source for high quality tech content out there. There is so much filler content in tech blogs, that I'm happy to pay to get access to high quality.
I must be on some grandfathered plan though, as I'm not paying near $500/year. That is a very steep price.
dboreham 7 hours ago [-]
Same. Mine is grandfathered in price from long ago. I couldn't work without it, although LLMs are becoming a good substitute for some subjects. The mobile app is a roach motel though.
theli0nheart 11 hours ago [-]
What are you paying?
AlexB138 10 hours ago [-]
$199/year. I think it is worth that, but I don't think I'd pay much more.
tech-ninja 7 hours ago [-]
I also pay $200/year, well worth the cost for me.
wrs 10 hours ago [-]
As another data point, I'm on an old plan for $199/year.
zargon 11 hours ago [-]
I'm grandfathered in at $200/year from the Safari days. The main advantage of the subscription to me is being able to evaluate several books on a topic to pick the one that is the best fit for what I need.
If I knew which books were best in category, it would be cheaper for me to just buy those specific books (or video courses, for things like Blender).
But if I had to pay the current $500 price, I wouldn't be a subscriber.
tech-ninja 7 hours ago [-]
Agreed, I'm also on a $200/year plan and for me too the fact that I can skim multiple books on a single topic before settling on one is well worth the money.
xbar 6 hours ago [-]
The app is unusable. I have a subscription available to me. I try to use it from time to time. The app is unusable.
elzbardico 44 minutes ago [-]
You can use the web.
JackAcid 2 hours ago [-]
$500/year?? Wow, I get it free as a military veteran. I still use it via browser at work quite often.
roadside_picnic 8 hours ago [-]
> Unfortunately, I cannot read technical books fast and definitely not fast enough to make the subscription be worth $500 per year.
For me I find the $500 to be a pretty clear win as far as value goes. My shelves are already overflowing with, while not "timeless", much slower aging technical books. But quite often, throughout a year, I'll want a deeper dive into a current topic than I can get from online resources + Claude. Quite often that dive involves wanting to look through multiple books (even if only using a few chapters).
I know I'm a dying breed, but, while I love AI for interactive exploration and learning, I find books more valuable in the era of endless YouTube tutorials and AI slop blog posts. Technical topics benefit from "big picture" thinking that basically doesn't exist in modern short-form web content.
j45 8 hours ago [-]
Books still activate a different part of the brain than reading on a screen, including e-ink, so it's not you or a dying breed, people may turn out to not learn as deeply or as quickly.
dceddia 7 hours ago [-]
I had kinda suspected this just based on my own experience of paper vs screen, but hadn’t run across any research.
Probably true but I'm not going to lug 10 textbooks onto a plane.
asdefghyk 2 hours ago [-]
I got offered a initial O'Reilly subscription of $200 / year - just last week ....
AlexeyBrin 12 hours ago [-]
I get it through my public library.
graypegg 11 hours ago [-]
Every library I've had a library card for (Toronto Public Library 7ish years ago, and BANQ Montréal) have had O'reilly subscriptions for free! A few other people have mentioned it in this thread with specific cities, but check your local one! It seems really common.
Though I wish I could check them out on my Kobo...
1313ed01 11 hours ago [-]
I signed up many years ago when they had 50% off and then was allowed to renew at the same price. Made it very difficult to cancel, knowing that I will have to pay full price if I ever want it back, but one year I looked at how much I had paid in total for reading those books and decided to cancel anyway.
Great site though. I never used the app, but mobile browser support was not bad.
Paid for it to read computer books, and did a lot of that, but also discovered much else. They also had (have?) courses and paid video presentation. I noticed one series of videos I watched there would have cost more to watch legally than I paid for an entire year of O'Reilly.
jayfx 6 hours ago [-]
I've concluded exactly the same!
It's far more cost effective to buy individual books than paying for the subscription.
Hard copies can also be sold if I decide not to keep them, which offsets costs even more
richard_todd 4 hours ago [-]
Lately I just ask an LLM to teach me things interactively. It will be interesting to see if that stops working so well, when authors stop writing books for LLMs to absorb. Maybe as long as there is some kind of canonical reference, the LLM can bridge the gap to decent educational material. If so, that's kind of sad, but also kind of awesome at the same time. It's definitely an interesting time to be alive. I wish I was just a little closer to retirement, though...
3 hours ago [-]
YellowZeeZee 10 hours ago [-]
I had the option to get a membership that I could expense through my work, but decided against it after the trial period ended.
The reason was entirely the terrible state of their app.
- Random crashes, or times when it would not start up at all.
- Text to speech is unusable because it cannot start reading at a specific point. Only at the beginning.
- Cannot download epub to use with a different (better) epub reader.
So even though it would not cost me anything, I realized I would never use it due to the issues with their app.
markus_zhang 11 hours ago [-]
I have figured that I’m going to get exactly one CS hobby that is not work, and 0 CS hobby if I can find a job that fits the hobby.
Then I figured there are less than ten books that I need to read, and probably less if I can get such a job because it is always a lot better to learn on the job.
So I agree with the author that such subscription is not very useful, and a paper book + a paper notepad are way better than reading books on a tablet.
jldugger 11 hours ago [-]
I have O'Reilly subs available both from my employer and my local library. Doesn't fix the UI issues but does at least shift the ROI calculus.
There are some applications that try to export O'Reilly books into Kindle formats, but every time I've tried they've mangled a few tables, formulas or sidebars, etc. I should probably sell or hand down my kindle and find something more suitable to O'Reilly.
charliesbot 12 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I agree about the O'Reilly app. It's pretty bad, so I'm actually thinking about just getting the book instead of using their app.
thih9 11 hours ago [-]
> will most likely not make me renew my subscription for the new year. Given the price, it will be probably
Will the author find the time and energy to actually cancel the subscription? The fact that he wrote the blog post and still haven’t cancelled makes me wonder.
giantrobot 10 hours ago [-]
The moment O'Reilly went subscription-only they lost me as a customer. I have a huge library of O'Reilly books I've purchased as PDFs. Shit I've got a huge library of print O'Reilly books despite years of slimming down.
It really sucked because I've been learning from O'Reilly books for thirty years. But I've become fundamentally opposed to DRM on media and subscription-only access is the ultimate DRM. I don't have any desire to be locked into their app to access stuff I paid for and be at the whims of their poor UI decisions.
daveoc64 10 hours ago [-]
They do still sell all of their books - just not directly on their website.
Whenever possible, they're sold without DRM.
giantrobot 7 hours ago [-]
Which is fine but they ruined their direct DRM-free sales. You used to get access to a PDF, epub, and mobi version of a book with no DRM. They even conveniently allowed you to sync your purchases to Dropbox. It was awesome.
Now you have to hope something g you're interested in ends up in a Humble Bundle or something. The situation is worse in every way for a end users.
bencornia 3 hours ago [-]
It would be such a dream if I could get an ebook, pdf, and physical copy. I love O'Reilly books and have been lucky to have access the last few years because of school.
antod 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah me too. The only recent O'Reilly books I have came from humblebundle specials.
I've also been pretty disappointed with their quality and/or usefulness lately. They seem to just cover stuff in a less technical vague high level way now. Hopefully that's just a sampling error on my part.
mindcrash 11 hours ago [-]
For me one of the best ways until now to get good quality IT books is (believe it or not): Humble Bundle (https://www.humblebundle.com/)
The past year they featured bundles from (quickly out of my head): O'Reilly, MIT Press, Manning, Pearson, Pragmatic Programmers and No Starch Press.
Oh, and Packt. But I left that one out because the quality of most Packt books is total shit (IMO).
It's the next best thing besides going on the seven seas if you want to reliably read IT related books on a ereader without spending a ton of money. (book bundles go for about $20 to $30 each, with most if of not all of them totaling up to $1000 or sometimes even more in value).
If you're fast there's still time to get these right now:
I was once asked to review a Packt book on a subject I knew well. Not only did it contain many factual errors, I wasn't allowed to point them out for correction - they rejected those suggestions. As I recall they wanted my free labor just to review presentation and basically rubber stamp it.
Have never bought from Packt since.
vittore 11 hours ago [-]
I used to buy almost every single one of their bundle, but at some point I got a feeling they started repeating with different bundle titles.
JackAcid 2 hours ago [-]
Packt books are pure shit.
zargon 11 hours ago [-]
Fanatical also has tech book bundles.
1313ed01 11 hours ago [-]
Back when I subscribed to O'Reilly I had a bookmark set up to search there with Packt excluded. Otherwise no matter what I searched for the results were clogged up with Packt-slop.
alebaffa 12 hours ago [-]
I agree O'Reilly is way too expensive.
stonecharioteer 45 minutes ago [-]
Manning wins points for giving me DRM free books and for their website. It's really nice and I like reading the books on it. So much so that I wish I could sync pdfs to the Web progress.
Good job Manning!
I hate the UX of O'reilly. Great books, but horrible HX. That company seems to have people who do not dogfood.
begueradj 11 hours ago [-]
> Unfortunately, I cannot read technical books fast and definitely not fast enough to make the subscription be worth $500 per year.
Reading is never about being fast at doing it.
If you don't want to read a book, read it fast.
riffic 11 hours ago [-]
there is an O'Reilly plan for public libraries which is dope and accessible to those less privileged to afford premium access.
poorblish 2 hours ago [-]
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123sereusername 6 hours ago [-]
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user3939382 12 hours ago [-]
The big name companies in tech are mostly extractive nightmares including FAANG. Orielly is the least of our problems.
Rendered at 04:33:22 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The user metrics in O'reilly (and probably most learning apps) has floored in the last 12 months. I see they've launched a new AI platform now. They're definitely going in a direction - time will tell if it's the right one.
Personally, I'd love a website that can provide all the ebooks oreilly provides. But it needs to work on a tablet.
The publishing industry veterans I've worked with told me it was even more incredible during the height of the dotcom boom: book sales in the 100,000 copy range was not that rare.
Today I can only think of two truly technical book stores that still exist: The MIT Press Bookstore in Cambridge, MA and Ada Books in Seattle, WA. The latter, while a delightful store, has relegated the true technical book section to the backroom, which unfortunately doesn't seem to get refreshed too often (though, part of the beauty of this is it still has many of the weird old technical books that used to be everywhere).
I was a developer in the 90s before Netscape even came out. I didn't have a computer at home and dialup barely existed. If you wanted to do computer stuff you had to read. If you wanted to try a library you had to buy a CD from a bookstore or mail in an order which would get posted to you.
Then in a three month period in late Spring 2000 all the programming books disappeared. Then my choice was between Amazon with quick delivery and the local store with a slower delivery and a higher price. So been buying from Amazon ever since and I can't remember the last time I have visited a bookstore.
Half price books and a few other book stores lulled me back a few times, but nonfiction books are kept around mostly as eye candy at this point.
Now I can't even walk in and browse what books the various departments are using for classes, anymore. Everything is now behind bars and completely inaccessible.
*Edit: spell correct kills me!
But a lot of is also in blogs and (video) tutorials. As well as Stack Overflow.
And all very searchable.
The old brick-of-paper approach to tech manuals just isn't a thing any more. I don't particularly miss it.
It was, if you think about, usually a slow and inefficient way to present information - often better at presenting what was possible than how to do make it happen.
I bought 2 books even though I won't have time to read them anytime soon.
Hopefully they'll find a way to keep going.
I myself spend around 200-300 usd on books every year. but I haven't bought a physical book in almost a decade. a pdf is perfectly fine. just sell it to me without DRM and have content thats worth the premium over wading through blogs.
How can these companies move forward and update their business model? Personally, I pay for manning's subscription. $24/month all you can eat. I would love more of these publishers switching to a netflix style model.
I consume a lot of short form technical content via blogs. would love a site where I can find medium written content with editorial oversight and quality control for technical correctness. obviously this costs money and it would be worth it to pay for that. I already do with manning. most of the content I consume are MEAPS. bleeding edge stuff that would likely be out of date by the time it makes it to dead paper form.
This would be advantageous to the publishers as well. this shifts the focus to put the content on the web and mobile in ways that are easy to access. The publishers also get data on what gets consumed informing what technical resources to commission.
They take up valuable screen space, it is annoying to scroll to the sections you need. Yeah yeah some PDFs have the side navigation thing. Most don't
With a book I can put in those little flags to bookmark sections, I can easily riffle the pages and scan for the chapter I need, I can hand write in the margins
I often need 2 or 3 books open to different sections, I like keeping them on my desk so I can glance at them when I need to
I've probably cracked $1000 spent on books this year.
I suppose a remarkable would be another route but… they are pricey.
Or is it because LLMs know everything that is in books, so people don't feel compelled to learn any more themselves?
LLMs are super helpful for learning, but without the foundation of a true textbook at your side they will very easily go off the rails into a world of imagination.
The web got a little better, and what drove brainshare and usage was a good experience getting started with reasonable defaults and good docs to get you started. API design is also much better these days- I was trying to find some examples of how unintuitive say MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes- big in the win9x days) apis were, but a lot of those docs seem to have disappeared- here is a stackoverflow/experts-exchange links that show how non-intuitive it was: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3255207/window-handle-in... https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/10018203/How-to-g...
Motif on the Unix side of things was a bit better, but not much. You really needed a good book to walk you through things in a more understandable way.
And then, it seems to be a real issue amongst some people to ask, "why should I learn X, when LLMs already know it?" Not unlike, "why should I learn to divide, when we have calculators?" but on a grander scale.
There is the problem of "I don't know what I don't know" that a course can solve for you. An LLM can sort of do that, but you have to take its word for it, and it does it pretty much strictly worse at the moment (but is much more flexible).
I'm less optimistic. Already 20+ years ago many people complained if you pointed them to books which answered their questions in depth. The standard reply was "just tell me how to solve this particular problem" instead.
From the people I know who wrote or co-wrote books, the way you make money is in future interview processes.
I don't know if they still do it, but when I interviewed for Google, they had a self-ranking system of how competent you are in each technology, and the only way to get the top score was phrased something like "I wrote the book on it (yes, an actual book)".
The worlds moved on from valuing the latest DSL and additions to the Linux kernel. Just a fad marketed at GenX and older Millennials.
SaaS is something tech billionaires need to exist. It's not something humanity needs. Not at the scale of the 2010s ZIRP fueled mania, anyway. Employers were using subscriptions to O'Reilly as a perk. No budget for perks in the AI and economic austerity era.
Maps app, communication apps, media consumption are all most of the billions of smartphone users care about.
One thing I notice is that it simply does not render many code snippets well, especially when using the "page" (vs "continuous" scrolling). I don't get the impression they are doing QA on rendering quality. Not only external publishers, but O'Reilly books themselves! I also had a lot of problems reading Manning books in their app.
Rendering e-books properly is a pretty big table-stake thing.
Support your local public library!
At least my library acts like that.
I pointed out that it would be far more cost–effective to simple let us request hard copies of whatever books we wanted, and then they would just stay in the library. No one worked remotely at the time.
We ended up getting Safari subscriptions for everyone.
You'll pay rent on the factory and interest on the loan you took out to buy the widget-making machine whether you make one widget or a million. But the amount you'll spend on plastic and machine operator wages goes up the more widgets you want to make.
So you can plot a line, y=mx+c where y is the amount you spend and x is the number of widgets you make. m is the cost of plastic and worker wages, c is the cost of rent and loan interest. (Obviously this is a simplification)
You would carefully monitor the per-unit costs of plastic and machine operator wages - but if you've got a machine that turns 10 cents of plastic into a $1 widget, the more plastic you put in the more profit you make. Only an idiot would try to save money by refusing to buy plastic.
On the other hand, if you need to take out a loan to buy plastic, that's an ominous sign indeed - because the previous batch of widgets should have sold at a profit, giving you all the cash needed to buy the plastic for the next batch.
Business is going great, in fact you're running your widget-making machine at full capacity, and you decide to buy a second one - which is an almighty expense, but definitely a sensible one. If you accounted for this the same way you account for plastic, your accounts would look crazy - you were making decent profit every year, then you suddenly took a 800% loss one year? - so instead this is shown in a separate place in the accounts.
Obviously, you do want to invest in new machines when it's profitable to do so - but if you have to delay the purchase by a few months, it's not the end of the world. And taking out a loan to buy the machine could be reasonable.
So basically operating expenses (plastic) and capital expenses (new machines) are paid for differently, managed differently, and accounted for differently.
Of course if you don't operate a widget factory, the distinctions and the reasons for them might be a lot less clear.
But again, the question is: is it ever rational for a functional unit manager to be given a particular maximum opex budget and not be allowed to capitalize a part of that? What benefit would such a restriction offer to the business?
You approve opex budget for the widget department because you know they can turn 10 cents of plastic into $1 of widgets, and you want them doing that in the forthcoming quarter. You're happy for them to spend a nigh-unlimited amount on inputs like plastic, so long as it's on things with a 90% margin.
But you don't want the department head spending their nigh-unlimited budget on things that don't get sold on with a 90% margin. So you don't let them charge the O'Reilly books to the nigh-unlimited part of their budget.
That said, like a lot of other content subscriptions, it can be quite anxiety inducing to make it seem like you're getting your money's worth. I've gotten the sub via my work, and I think the labs and videos are quite good, plus the occasional opportunities to do live-chats with the authors. But you have to sift through a lot of content and dedicate a lot of hours to use them. For most folks, I think buying a few technical books a year as needed would be a much better use of time and money.
But the app is pretty kludgey and it's way more locked down than other publishers who will give you chapter PDFs.
At least it's a good way to skim books to see if they're worth buying a physical copy.
I feel like this is a little known secret (discount via ACM) that more folks should know about. Hopefully this post helps spread the word.
> unlimited access to ACM's collection of thousands of online books, video courses, interactive sandboxes, practice labs, and AI-enabled tools from O'Reilly and Skillsoft Percipio
I get it through my library:
* https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDMEDB00...
Reading this and thinking of my consumption I start wondering if it is still worth it
I must be on some grandfathered plan though, as I'm not paying near $500/year. That is a very steep price.
If I knew which books were best in category, it would be cheaper for me to just buy those specific books (or video courses, for things like Blender).
But if I had to pay the current $500 price, I wouldn't be a subscriber.
For me I find the $500 to be a pretty clear win as far as value goes. My shelves are already overflowing with, while not "timeless", much slower aging technical books. But quite often, throughout a year, I'll want a deeper dive into a current topic than I can get from online resources + Claude. Quite often that dive involves wanting to look through multiple books (even if only using a few chapters).
I know I'm a dying breed, but, while I love AI for interactive exploration and learning, I find books more valuable in the era of endless YouTube tutorials and AI slop blog posts. Technical topics benefit from "big picture" thinking that basically doesn't exist in modern short-form web content.
After seeing your comment I went looking! I found this interesting: https://phys.org/news/2024-02-screens-paper-effective-absorb...
Though I wish I could check them out on my Kobo...
Great site though. I never used the app, but mobile browser support was not bad.
Paid for it to read computer books, and did a lot of that, but also discovered much else. They also had (have?) courses and paid video presentation. I noticed one series of videos I watched there would have cost more to watch legally than I paid for an entire year of O'Reilly.
The reason was entirely the terrible state of their app.
- Random crashes, or times when it would not start up at all.
- Text to speech is unusable because it cannot start reading at a specific point. Only at the beginning.
- Cannot download epub to use with a different (better) epub reader.
So even though it would not cost me anything, I realized I would never use it due to the issues with their app.
Then I figured there are less than ten books that I need to read, and probably less if I can get such a job because it is always a lot better to learn on the job.
So I agree with the author that such subscription is not very useful, and a paper book + a paper notepad are way better than reading books on a tablet.
There are some applications that try to export O'Reilly books into Kindle formats, but every time I've tried they've mangled a few tables, formulas or sidebars, etc. I should probably sell or hand down my kindle and find something more suitable to O'Reilly.
Will the author find the time and energy to actually cancel the subscription? The fact that he wrote the blog post and still haven’t cancelled makes me wonder.
It really sucked because I've been learning from O'Reilly books for thirty years. But I've become fundamentally opposed to DRM on media and subscription-only access is the ultimate DRM. I don't have any desire to be locked into their app to access stuff I paid for and be at the whims of their poor UI decisions.
Whenever possible, they're sold without DRM.
Now you have to hope something g you're interested in ends up in a Humble Bundle or something. The situation is worse in every way for a end users.
I've also been pretty disappointed with their quality and/or usefulness lately. They seem to just cover stuff in a less technical vague high level way now. Hopefully that's just a sampling error on my part.
The past year they featured bundles from (quickly out of my head): O'Reilly, MIT Press, Manning, Pearson, Pragmatic Programmers and No Starch Press.
Oh, and Packt. But I left that one out because the quality of most Packt books is total shit (IMO).
It's the next best thing besides going on the seven seas if you want to reliably read IT related books on a ereader without spending a ton of money. (book bundles go for about $20 to $30 each, with most if of not all of them totaling up to $1000 or sometimes even more in value).
If you're fast there's still time to get these right now:
15 Linux/DevOps related books from O'Reilly: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/linux-from-beginner-to-pr...
20 Data Science/Data Engineering related books from O'Reilly: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/data-engineering-science-...
18 Hacking/Cybersec related books from No Starch: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/hacking-no-starch-books
19 Software Architecture related books from Pearson: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/software-architecture-pea...
29 AI related books from Manning: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/ultimate-ai-algorithms-an...
21 Microsoft Certification prep books from Pearson: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/microsoft-certification-p...
19 books on Software Strategy and Risk Management from Pragmatic Programmers: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/software-strategy-and-ris...
Have never bought from Packt since.
Good job Manning!
I hate the UX of O'reilly. Great books, but horrible HX. That company seems to have people who do not dogfood.
Reading is never about being fast at doing it.
If you don't want to read a book, read it fast.