[ansible]

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.

[kod]

Get an ACM membership. It includes full access to oreilly books.

[blub]

You mean over Safari or as pdf?

[kod]

Safari

[Groxx]

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.

[ryansmccoy]

They discount the subscription 50% on black friday.

[ansible]

> 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.

[ryansmccoy]

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.

[unethical_ban]

They don't sell ebooks anymore?

[ansible]

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.

[ilamont]

They also forced some publishers off the platform, even if they participated in Safari.

[lovehashbrowns]

Do you know which publishers they pushed off the platform?

[ilamont]

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.