Tim O'Reilly once said "Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy". I discovered and purchased almost every Rosenfeld Media book from OReilly.<p>After O'Reilly moved to DRM-free books, their 2009 sales went up by 104% <a href="http://toc.oreilly.com/2010/01/2009-oreilly-ebook-revenue-up-104-percent.html" rel="nofollow">http://toc.oreilly.com/2010/01/2009-oreilly-ebook-revenue-up...</a><p>In other interviews, he seemed confident that DRM wasn't worth it
<a href="https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0411/focus-tim-oreilly-media-e-book-antipiracy-steal-this.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0411/focus-tim-oreilly-me...</a><p>Perhaps some part of the equation has changed since then. I'm looking forward a deeper analysis of the business reasons for this.<p>I'm also interested to hear what more authors think - I wonder how many agree with Martin Kleppmann (Designing Data Intensive Applications) <a href="https://twitter.com/martinkl/status/880336943980085248" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/martinkl/status/880336943980085248</a><p>This independence day weekend there were a lot of sales, so I purchased:<p>* "Programming Clojure, Third Edition" from pragprog (30% off sale)<p>* The entire collection of "Enthusiast's Guide to ..." from rockynook (each for $10)<p>* "The Quick Python Book 3e", "Serverless Architectures on AWS", "Event Streams in Action", "Get Programming with Haskell" from Manning (50% off)<p>These sales are the only way I can afford the volume I read. Some of that money would have gone to OReilly authors, but they deleted my <i>full cart</i> with $100 worth of stuff before I could purchase!<p>EDIT: OReilly catalog seemed large & redundant with publishers (packt) offering the same materials on their sites. Some like Wiley / MKP only offered very few items from their catalogs. Others like Rosenfeld / rockynook / no starch now provide DRM free options directly from their sites. I'm hoping at least OReilly reconsiders selling their Animal books again.
Perhaps best read after the blog post from current O'Reilly media president Laura Baldwin, which makes two important points:<p>1) Book sales have been consistently declining overall, in all media. It's not clear that DRM has much to do with this.<p>2) They'll still be selling DRM-free through at least one merchant, Google Play. (It's not clear whether this policy extends to Amazon as well, but they wouldn't be the first publisher selling DRM-free there; Tor's science fiction novels have been DRM-free through all merchants for a few years now.)<p>Source: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oreilly-mission-spreading-knowledge-innovators-laura-baldwin" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oreilly-mission-spreading-kno...</a>
> They can also reach buyers who want to see the full product before making a purchasing decision or who wouldn't become aware of your book through conventional marketing efforts.<p>This is definitely true for me, and one of the reasons why Oreilly is one of the defining "colors" on my bookshelf. In particular with technical literature I really need to get a good look into the book before I make a commitment and a decision to buy. I just don't want to spend money first and then stick to something that turns out to be rather disappointing.<p>So my usual way of buying books is to download various publications on a topic via Bittorrent and then buying the best one once I know what I want. This is similar to going to a public library, getting a few books, and buying the most convincing one for long-term use. If there was a micropayment way of paying for the short-term evaluation, I would be more than happy to pay for that (as I implicitly pay via library contributions, which go to the publishers to some part).<p>Having said that, Oreilly traditionally had a market of being the "printed out manual of open source software", which I'm pretty sure is dead by now, and I wonder if they can reposition completely. One thing I noticed is that they now often sell books that have titles that sound very general "Data Science for blabla" but turn out to be really just tutorials/manuals for some particular framework. That's the kind of book I would want to avoid. Nothing against good examples, but I don't need printed out tutorials.
DRM-free epubs are at least supposed to be available from Google Books (though Kleppmann says when he tried with his book it wasn't DRM-free) - the ebook.com folks say that they have DRM-free epub and PDFs, but I don't know if the PDFs are the high-quality print editions that ORA used to sell or the crappy epub-PDF conversion that Google books sells, and what exactly ebooks.com means by 'DRM-free' - they make reference to having to use a specific Adobe software package to read them, but that you have the right to print and copy-and-paste. Until I see it opened in some libre-PDF reader I don't know that I trust it.<p>One bummer: Nearly everything I bought from O'Reilly were 'Early Release' books - The Kleppmann 'Data Intensive Apps' book took like two years for him to finish (not complaining, books aren't easy and this book was exceptionally well-researched), but it was nice to have the first half of the book available early on. Sadly, the Early Release program seems to be only available through Safari now. There were like five books I had planned to buy over the holiday weekend that now I guess I'll have to wait a year or so before being able to buy.<p>I also don't get the folks saying "Just buy $DIFFERENT_PUBLISHER books instead" - books aren't interchangeable, people buy specific titles, not whatever the publisher's version of that topic might be.
Disclaimer: I have commercial interest with oreilly. I speak at a ton of their conferences and lean on them partially for marketing and lead gen.<p>Oreilly author here. FWIW a ton of us were caught off guard by this as well. At the same time, I can't say I'm surprised.<p>My commercial incentives for working with oreilly wasn't about the book per se. I found a ton of value in working with them for their peripheral activities including safari, their strata , and AI conferences. I think other folks who write for oreilly tend to do these same things.<p>Pointing out where oreilly is making money: It tends to be large companies paying for access to safari now.<p>They will be putting other content in there now.<p>Print is a dying media. That being said: A ton of people prefer print still.<p>I don't think any end user or author of their's is "happy" about this per se. 1 benefit I liked of the online store was the ability to point people at that for pre releases and updates.
You can't really do that with amazon.<p>I may be naively hopeful in saying this, but..<p>That being said: this should allow them to invest in other distribution channels now as well.<p>Oreilly showed they know how to run a distribution channel and may use that expertise in other areas.<p>As someone closer to this than a lot of people, I'm happy to answer general questions about the process, other ways this could affect us etc, if that helps.
They are my main source for PDF DRM free books (I don't care about stamping my name as long as it can be read anywhere).<p>If they stop selling then they lose 100% of my business which is about $100 a year.<p>I don't use other formats. They screw technical books too badly. Some other publishers like Apress and MS Press do okay too but if O'Reilly pulls out then it's quite a blow.
I was at a garage sale and I was perusing a bunch of Wrox books. The seller offered me a ridiculous price and then I noticed he was on the cover of one of them.<p>I asked him about it and I think he'd rather have the latter benefits than the minuscule compensation:<p>"Piracy is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it means you receive no compensation for the benefit readers get from the work you put in. On the other hand, pirated books act as implicit marketing, expanding awareness of you and your book(s)."<p>So I bought the books, but asked if he had another copy of his own book. He said that he did not, because that he guesses he should keep a copy as, after all, he was the author. That's a lot of trauma for him to say something like that.
DRM-less PDF encourage me to buy books that I'm not going to read anytime soon, and I bought few books I didn't read yet and may be I won't read at all. But the point is, my PDF is always with me in my backups and no matter what happens with DRM software, platforms or publisher, I can always read them. That's important for me, I truly own this copy, not some stupid renting thing.
I sincerely doubt the change had anything to do with DRM. Book sales have been declining for years. Developers just don't use books as their primary source of learning anymore. I believe OReilly is going to double down on their subscription service, Safari.
O'Reilly used to produce the definitive bibles that you were required to own to work on different technologies, but I feel like the quality has gone down over the last 10 years or so. I don't know if that is a byproduct of developers relying on books less, or technology moving faster, or poor publishing decisions. But it has probably contributed more than DRM, one way or the other, to their decline.
The conclusion here (to paraphrase: "no DRM isn't a big enough draw") doesn't seem to be at all supported. It may be that they want to focus on publishing; it may be that they simply had to charge too much; it may be that it wasn't bringing in enough sales to make it worthwhile, compared to other retail channels.<p>Without more data (or really... any), this conclusion is pure speculation.
> Piracy is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it means you receive no compensation for the benefit readers get from the work you put in. On the other hand, pirated books act as implicit marketing, expanding awareness of you and your book(s). <i>They can also reach buyers who want to see the full product before making a purchasing decision</i> or who wouldn't become aware of your book through conventional marketing efforts.<p>The point I've emphasized above really matters a lot for people who do read many books. Despite select chapter previews that some publishers provide, there are people who really want to do their own evaluation of something before committing to buying it.<p>> <i>My feeling is that most people who choose pirated books are unlikely to pay for them, even if that's the only way to get them.</i> As such, I'm inclined to think the marketing effect of illegal copies exceeds the lost revenue. I have no data to back me up. Maybe it's just a rationalization to help me live with the knowledge that no matter what you do, there's no way you can prevent bootleg copies of your books from showing up on the Net.<p>Again, the emphasized sentence above has been known for a very long time in the areas of music, movies, TV shows, books - any content, actually. In my observation, people who pirate books also tend get into a habit of hoarding rather than reading (low disk/storage and bandwidth costs). Leaving aside the people who are in countries with poorer currencies and cannot really imagine buying a lot of the English language technical content produced, I doubt if the real loss in revenue is even substantial.<p>Books also, depending on the subject, require investments of time, attention, memory and repeated reference, unlike movies, TV shows and music that most of the time require a "one time investment". So I would not consider books to be in the same category as others when it comes to piracy.<p>I'm not at all happy with O'Reilly's decision, and did write to support at oreilly saying that this makes it difficult (finding DRM free content on amazon or elsewhere in multiple formats) and that I wouldn't be buying O'Reilly products again. I received a standard reply thanking me for the feedback and pointing me to the blog post. My guess is that the direct customer relationship and brand recognition through its website is going to be lost along with this decision.<p>I don't know if O'Reilly will change the decision, but people who do value the freedom of DRM free content in different formats <i>must voice their opinions</i> by writing to O'Reilly support.
I have given a few O'Reilly DRM-free books to colleagues. Younger colleagues, who usually have never heard of an "animal book." I always point out where it came from, and suggest that if they like it, they either buy it, or buy something else from O'Reilly.<p>Maybe some did, I don't know. I suspect that the ones that didn't, probably wouldn't buy a similar book from anyone, not because of piracy, but because they just aren't into that particular kind of product. So no (real) harm, no foul.
I bought probably about 20 books on O'Reilly website. Mainly because they are typically of good quality but also because they're drm free.<p>I always appreciated that they were available in any format (pdf/ebook etc) and thus easier to search. You can even sync them to your dropbox automatically after purchase. A download them.<p>We had a book service at a former company and it was terrible, one page at a time with a clunky web interface. Being able to download and scan them was much appreciated.<p>But as internet search gets better, you find quick solutions on stack overflow. It must be hard selling books.
The death of the DRM-free model was a big concern to me, but a recent supplementary blog post from Laura Baldwin, linked-to in the article but not called out, seems to claim that O'Reilly books will still be available DRM-free from Google Books. It's not clear to me if this means the Google Play e-book store, or something else.<p>Blog post here: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oreilly-mission-spreading-knowledge-innovators-laura-baldwin" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oreilly-mission-spreading-kno...</a>
So does anyone know of another online bookstore that is completely DRM-free? I mean both hard DRM (encryption) and soft DRM (watermarking, be it visible or invisible). That O'Reilly was completely DRM-free (AFAICT) made me spend quite an amount of money on their eBooks over the years... I wonder who wants to serve that market in the future? It seems that all the other options at least do watermarking, which makes it uninteresting to me.<p>Guess I'll have to buy everything as print books again...
I like reading PDFs of books on my phone, especially on my commute. It works surprisingly well, better than I thought it would.<p>My work bought a copy of Designing Data Intensive Applications for the team, I've started reading it but lugging around 1kg of book every day gets old really quick, I wish they would have offered a PDF download coupon or something inside.
I wonder why they still offer the Google Play versions as being "DRM free"<p>Is it just Google has more weight they can throw around and O'Reilly didn't want to 'rock the boat', or was it a technical problem?<p>Apparently the Google Play versions of O'Reilly books are formatted strangely and aren't a direct PDF of the physical books.
When I discovered books at OReilly I thought I had stumbled into heaven. I bought a couple hundred books over several years. I thought they "get it." No longer.<p>Companies are starting to get serious about product and service lock-in, for me and many others the paradigm is repellent.
I liked using the O'Reilly early release program available from the site (as well as Manning's MEAP program). Is there any replacement for that now?<p>I also prefer the PDF versions which I can print out a chapter when I need to read hard-copy Instead of carrying with me an entire book (live/work in Manhattan, we don't use cars much and value light-weight equipment).