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.<p>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.<p>Personally, I'd love a website that can provide all the ebooks oreilly provides. But it needs to work on a tablet.
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.
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.
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 <i>massive</i> 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 <i>store</i> filled with books on every technical topic imaginable.<p>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.<p>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).
That's a shame. I got an email from them suggesting that they had a tough year.<p>I bought 2 books even though I won't have time to read them anytime soon.<p>Hopefully they'll find a way to keep going.
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).
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
...
Is this because people seek knowledge from LLMs rather than from books now?<p>Or is it because LLMs know everything that is in books, so people don't feel compelled to learn any more themselves?
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.
Even before LLMs became big I started hording solid technical books, as there was so much <i>mis</i>information on Google/SO that any non-trivial technical question could not be answer without a high probability that the answer was fundamentally wrong.<p>LLMs <i>are</i> 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.
Another option might be that people are increasingly using LLMs to write the books.
loaded questions.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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).
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?
> Nobody was making money from the process.<p>From the people I know who wrote or co-wrote books, the way you make money is in future interview processes.<p>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)".
Anecdotal evidence, all books I bought this year were used.
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++!<p>The worlds moved on from valuing the latest DSL and additions to the Linux kernel. Just a fad marketed at GenX and older Millennials.<p>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.<p>Maps app, communication apps, media consumption are all most of the billions of smartphone users care about.
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.
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.
Seattle Public Libraries (spl.org) also provides no-cost access to the O'Reilly Complete collection as a membership benefit.<p>Support your local public library!
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.<p>At least my library acts like that.
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.<p>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.<p>We ended up getting Safari subscriptions for everyone.
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.
This separation and other accounting peculiarities like use it or lose it budgeting cause so much inefficiency.
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?
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.
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.
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.<p>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.
For those curious about the ACM membership: <a href="https://www.acm.org/membership/membership-options" rel="nofollow">https://www.acm.org/membership/membership-options</a>
> 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.
Is this ACM membership worth it?
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:<p>> 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>I get the O’Reilly subscription through the ACM.</i><p>I get it through my library:<p>* <a href="https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDMEDB0099&R=EDB0099" rel="nofollow">https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDMEDB00...</a>
I do this too. It was a easy sell to my department
You can quite often get a $300 yearly sub to O'Reilly, they run a discount ~4 times a year.<p>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.
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.<p>But the app is pretty kludgey and it's way more locked down than other publishers who will give you chapter PDFs.<p>At least it's a good way to skim books to see if they're worth buying a physical copy.
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.<p>I must be on some grandfathered plan though, as I'm not paying near $500/year. That is a very steep price.
What are you paying?
I also pay $200/year, well worth the cost for me.
$199/year. I think it is worth that, but I don't think I'd pay much more.
As another data point, I'm on an old plan for $199/year.
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.<p>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).<p>But if I had to pay the current $500 price, I wouldn't be a subscriber.
> Unfortunately, I cannot read technical books fast and definitely not fast enough to make the subscription be worth $500 per year.<p>For me I find the $500 to be a pretty clear <i>win</i> 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).<p>I know I'm a dying breed, but, while I love AI for interactive exploration and learning, I find books <i>more</i> 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.
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.
I had kinda suspected this just based on my own experience of paper vs screen, but hadn’t run across any research.<p>After seeing your comment I went looking! I found this interesting: <a href="https://phys.org/news/2024-02-screens-paper-effective-absorb-retain.html" rel="nofollow">https://phys.org/news/2024-02-screens-paper-effective-absorb...</a>
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.<p>Great site though. I never used the app, but mobile browser support was not bad.<p>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.
I had the option to get a membership that I could expense through my work, but decided against it after the trial period ended.<p>The reason was entirely the terrible state of their app.<p>- Random crashes, or times when it would not start up at all.<p>- Text to speech is unusable because it cannot start reading at a specific point. Only at the beginning.<p>- Cannot download epub to use with a different (better) epub reader.<p>So even though it would not cost me anything, I realized I would never use it due to the issues with their app.
I get it through my public library.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.
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.
> will most likely not make me renew my subscription for the new year. Given the price, it will be probably<p>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 moment O'Reilly went subscription-only they lost me as a customer. I have a <i>huge</i> library of O'Reilly books I've purchased as PDFs. Shit I've got a huge library of <i>print</i> O'Reilly books despite years of slimming down.<p>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.
I agree O'Reilly is way too expensive.
> Unfortunately, I cannot read technical books fast and definitely not fast enough to make the subscription be worth $500 per year.<p>Reading is never about being fast at doing it.<p>If you don't want to read a book, read it fast.
For me one of the best ways until now to get good quality IT books is (believe it or not): Humble Bundle (<a href="https://www.humblebundle.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.humblebundle.com/</a>)<p>The past year they featured bundles from (quickly out of my head): O'Reilly, MIT Press, Manning, Pearson, Pragmatic Programmers and No Starch Press.<p>Oh, and Packt. But I left that one out because the quality of most Packt books is total shit (IMO).<p>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).<p>If you're fast there's still time to get these right now:<p>15 Linux/DevOps related books from O'Reilly: <a href="https://www.humblebundle.com/books/linux-from-beginner-to-professional-oreilly-books-encore" rel="nofollow">https://www.humblebundle.com/books/linux-from-beginner-to-pr...</a><p>20 Data Science/Data Engineering related books from O'Reilly: <a href="https://www.humblebundle.com/books/data-engineering-science-oreilly-books" rel="nofollow">https://www.humblebundle.com/books/data-engineering-science-...</a><p>18 Hacking/Cybersec related books from No Starch: <a href="https://www.humblebundle.com/books/hacking-no-starch-books" rel="nofollow">https://www.humblebundle.com/books/hacking-no-starch-books</a><p>19 Software Architecture related books from Pearson: <a href="https://www.humblebundle.com/books/software-architecture-pearson-books" rel="nofollow">https://www.humblebundle.com/books/software-architecture-pea...</a><p>29 AI related books from Manning: <a href="https://www.humblebundle.com/books/ultimate-ai-algorithms-and-llms-manning-books" rel="nofollow">https://www.humblebundle.com/books/ultimate-ai-algorithms-an...</a><p>21 Microsoft Certification prep books from Pearson: <a href="https://www.humblebundle.com/books/microsoft-certification-prep-microsoft-press-and-pearson" rel="nofollow">https://www.humblebundle.com/books/microsoft-certification-p...</a><p>19 books on Software Strategy and Risk Management from Pragmatic Programmers: <a href="https://www.humblebundle.com/books/software-strategy-and-risk-management-pragmatic-programmers-books" rel="nofollow">https://www.humblebundle.com/books/software-strategy-and-ris...</a>
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.<p>Have never bought from Packt since.
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.
Fanatical also has tech book bundles.
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.
there is an O'Reilly plan for public libraries which is dope and accessible to those less privileged to afford premium access.
The big name companies in tech are mostly extractive nightmares including FAANG. Orielly is the least of our problems.