No More O'reilly Subscriptions for Me
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The cost of an O'Reilly subscription has sparked a heated debate, with some users finding it prohibitively expensive at $500/year, while others have discovered more affordable alternatives. One commenter revealed they access O'Reilly through the ACM for just $75 extra per year on top of their $99 membership, prompting others to weigh in on the value of ACM membership. As it turns out, some users are getting O'Reilly content through their libraries, making the expensive subscription unnecessary. The discussion also touched on the ACM's recent shift to open-access publications, although this doesn't directly impact O'Reilly's content.
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> 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
Reading this and thinking of my consumption I start wondering if it is still worth it
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.
I get it through my library:
* https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDMEDB00...
I must be on some grandfathered plan though, as I'm not paying near $500/year. That is a very steep price.
Well, it's good business for them and for me. I can access books when it comes to my mind (not that often). They get the money. I would certainly never subscribe again at current rates.
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.
This is purely a problem if you have to get a loan or something. If you’re the sole owner of the business, you can count money the normal way, since it’s all the same money to you. I.e. you don’t have to spend silly amounts on renting when owning is actually cheaper.
And, as far as expenses go for a research institute, $4k/mo is very inexpensive.
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.
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.
Out of an abundance of curiosity, I discovered an archive of your comment, which I didn’t myself make, but I link here for purposes of discussion:
https://archive.is/C3gAc
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.
I got a remarkable pro, and it's just slightly better than screen. Being able to annotate books is actually a welcomed addition, and the screen is pretty decent. But flipping screen is slow (compared to a printed book), and going back and forth between pages is a hassle. Until we have the speed of a tablet (read: instant), with the screen quality of an e-ink, I don't think I'll voluntarily retire printed books.
Now, I have an O'Reilly subscription (two actually, through school and ACM), but the app is sadly horrendous, as OP mentioned. Hard to believe this is actually their core business.
https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=46179347&goto=item%3Fi...
How are you able to download the videos to begin with?
Seems like I'm stuck using Ed.
Or is it because LLMs know everything that is in books, so people don't feel compelled to learn any more themselves?
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.
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.
Damn few of them.
I'm thinking the "industry" will contract a lot, but there will always be a niche for deep "real books" on a subject. It will just be much smaller.
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.
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.
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).
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell%27s_Books
They've been owned by a string of financial firms who didn't give a shit about book quality (neither the content nor the books as physical artifacts) and forced out most of the employees who did, and it shows.
*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.
that, i feel, is the chilling aspect to this situation. does the lack of new books explaining what's possible, imply that our society's opportunites for growth are dwindling?
When I think about this, I get a little bit scared. Imagine books going away, even if it's just the subcategory of technical books.
The printed word has been around for a long time. The number of things that have been printed has always gone up. It really bothers me that that's changing.
PDFs and websites are no substitute for printed paper bound in a cover. PDFs and websites are a fallback when the preferred media isn't available, they are not supposed to be the preferred media. All of the of the reasons that people have given over the years are applicable when it comes to why paper is superior for this.
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.
B&N, and Borders, are how I learned to code. Directionless after college, I thought, hey, why not learn how to make websites? And I'd spend a lot of time after work reading books at these stores (and yes, buying too).
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.
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.
Can't you just download pirated copies as a pdf or epub and read them on any device? It feels much more convenient than using a shitty DRM app, and if you have ethical concerns nothing's stopping you from still paying for a subscription while doing that.
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.
At least my library acts like that.
Support your local public library!
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.
Though I wish I could check them out on my Kobo...
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.
Reading is never about being fast at doing it.
Fast reading is actually the opposite of reading.
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.
They can't have even lost money if people were just claiming to own books to get the cheap price. Their marginal cost for the PDFs was effectively zero so at $5 they were making plenty of money on them. At the time a PDF only copy of their books was about $10.
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.
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...
There's some others about learning more from writing with pen on paper compared to tablet or taking notes digitally typing.
I am a digital note taker at heart but can't deny using a notebook still has better outcomes sometimes.
Someone who is carefully critical of what the LLM says to make sure that they don't come away with a completely false understanding is going to need to spend more effort tracking down real sources and discrediting the LLM's bullshit claims than they would have spend just finding the most appropriate reliable source of information to begin with.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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