> 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...
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 must be on some grandfathered plan though, as I'm not paying near $500/year. That is a very steep price.
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.
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.
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 overall decline in nonfiction book sales, generally said to be around 30% each year, has impacted us greatly. We took steps to mitigate the situation, and we were viable. Then we were forced to switch distributors. Our income from the channel dried up for five months, and it might never recover to prior levels. This year we have lost money for seven of the eight months so far.
Our cash flow has reached the point where only drastic steps will allow us to continue paying royalties on the books we have already published.
We are not going out of business, at least not now. You will continue to receive royalties on any titles that are currently being sold or that are in production. But we are stripping the business back to the bone in order to enable us to do that:
We must let all our full- and part-time staff go. This breaks our hearts: these are our friends as well as our amazing colleagues, but the monthly overhead means we wouldn’t be able to pay all the royalties in December. We must stop acquiring new titles and developing existing pre-beta titles. This is partly because we will no longer have Susannah to manage the process, but also because the costs of getting titles into production have risen to the point where our cash flow is impacted for many months. (You may have noticed that the royalty level you received when a book was in beta dropped when a book was published, and then did not recover for a while). In the past we could absorb that cash-flow hit from reserves; no longer.
We will do everything we can to ensure that books that have entered production and that are currently in beta complete the process and end up in print.
We will continue to sell books, both online and via our distribution channels. We will continue to promote titles as we publish them, and after that we will continue to promote all our titles.
We will collect revenue as we do now, and we will use it to pay royalties as normal.
Roughly 65% of our income goes to pay royalties: authors, development editors, and series editors. At some point in the future, the money that remains after paying royalties may not cover our fixed costs. If that happens, we will be forced to close completely."
Or is it because LLMs know everything that is in books, so people don't feel compelled to learn any more themselves?
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.
Support your local public library!
At least my library acts like that.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
alebaffa•1h ago