

O'Reilly is selling any eBook for $9.99 today - brandon
http://oreilly.com/store/index.html

======
just_the_tip
You can get $5 O'Reilly EPUBs from the App Store everyday.

Extracting an epub from an iPhone app is easy. First you unzip the .ipa file.
Then you cd to Payload/*/book. Finally, you zip up the files to an .epub file:
zip -X ~/book.epub mimetype && zip -r9DX ~/book.epub META-INF OEBPS.

mimetype must be first in the archive for validity, which you can test with
EpubCheck.

~~~
anotherperson
This is definitely a hacky way to go. I just tried it with Matz’s Ruby book.
Reading it with Stanza on OSX is just about the ugliest digital reading
experience outside of scanned text.

Oh well, it only set me back 5 bucks.

~~~
just_the_tip
It's an issue of using a subpar client, not a subpar format. I have yet to
find a decent epub reader for a computer. Stanza for iPhone, iBooks, and
dedicated hardware render epubs beautifully.

------
dtf
Exciting headline; miserable experience.

 _We're sorry, an error has occurred in our application._

So now I've finally given up after the tenth attempt. I guess O'Reilly won't
be selling me that copy of _Building Scalable Websites_ after all.

~~~
DannoHung
My order went through, but I can't access my book :(

~~~
abronte
Same here, when I go to the "emedia" page, it sits there loading for a good 3
minutes, then says I don't have anything to download.

~~~
drawkbox
Appears to be a common trend, same situation here for iPhone 3D I just got and
was excited to 'download immediately' but I get 'no data' or no books to
download.

~~~
thirdstation
I called them and the rep said it's b/c of the load. She assured me that it
will show up eventually.

~~~
runevault
Kinda figured this would be the case, was planning on waiting until tomorrow
to bug them. Glad to hear someone already got it confirmed though.

------
swombat
If I had an iPad I might consider it to see if I can read on that, but I've
found that I only ever read books when printed on the pulped, mangled,
processed bodies of brutally murdered trees.

~~~
jrockway
Why would an iPad help? It still has the eyeball-melting backlight, and it has
a glossy screen, so you have to read through a reflection.

There's a reason why people like e-ink-based ebook readers so much. They may
not have games, but they are really good for reading ebooks. (Though I admit
that the normal Kindle is not so great for books that have diagrams.)

~~~
Terretta
I have a Kindle DX. Love it for reading research PDFs from start to finish.

I had also figured it would be fantastic to shrink the shelf space for tech
books, and always have those books at hand. Big downside that doesn't hit you
till you try to use it for this purpose: the e-ink can't page flip fast enough
to be useful.

Readers on the iPad (iBooks, even Kindle app) don't have this issue.

~~~
jrockway
I'm not sure I follow. But what I have learned from reading HN is that I am
probably the only person in the world that reads each page of a book in order.
I start with the first page. When I'm done reading that page, I read the
second page. Induct on n.

~~~
benatkin
This might be my favorite comment of yours.

I usually trip up on the "induct on n" part. Fortunately, I start enough books
that I still finish a few each year.

~~~
jamesbritt

        I usually trip up on the "induct on n" part.
    

I sometimes get "out of memory" errors; restarting sometimes help.

------
ydant
For anyone else trying to find this out and finding the site to be amazingly
slow:

Use coupon code FAVFA - prices won't be discounted until check-out.

It works for multiple books, although the headline looks like it's for a
single book.

~~~
Terretta
> _it works for multiple books_

FYI: Looks like ordering multiple books created issues getting delivery of
yesterday's purchases. I also lost the discount _after_ checkout. Today's
order pricing isn't what was reflected at checkout.

Today the two titles I bought in two orders are listed as "registered" under
the registered books area.

Order status on both orders reflects "BOOKED", but shipped is 0, download link
is not active, and the books are not listed in the downloads section.

One purchase shows the discount, the other reflects full price without
discount.

An email to O'Reilly auto-responded with this:

> _Thank you for contacting O'Reilly Media Customer Service. We are
> experiencing a very heavy volume of orders due to our recent promotion. This
> is affecting the delivery and access of your electronic media. Please be
> patient and keep checking your account._

TL;DR: Buyers should double-check orders to see what was actually charged.

~~~
Terretta
O'Reilly is catching up, and fixing order discounts too:

_____________________

I apologize for the delay in getting back to you. I checked your account and
you now have access. You can download your ebook here:

<https://members.oreilly.com/account/emedia>

There were issues with our servers on Friday due to high loads, and we've been
working to make sure everyone received the content they purchased.

We have refunded you the amount that you would have saved if the discount code
was applied to one of your orders. Please allow 5-7 business days for the
credit to appear on your statement.

Thank you again for your orders and for your understanding. Please let us know
if we can be of any further assistance.

Best Regards, O'Reilly Media Customer Service

_____________________

Thanks, O'Reilly.

------
slantyyz
I think there are some valuable lessons to be learned by this sale for
O'Reilly, tech publishers and authors.

* 9.99 standard pricing will result in incredibly high sales volumes (the servers would not nearly have been overloaded if everyone wasn't clamoring to get their purchases in before the deadline)

* Publishers and authors need to decide whether they want larger margins w/low volumes - I am of the understanding that selling 5k copies is considered a best seller in the tech market - instead of lower margins with higher volumes. I'm hoping that the results of yesterday's sale might make them consider the first point above.

It would be interesting to see if O'Reilly released some statistics on book
sales in the wake of yesterday's server bloodbath.

Myself, I bought a pile of books that I otherwise would not have bought. I
have an O'Reilly Safari subscription that is already saving me tons of money,
and the low price just pushed me over the edge to buy some local copies of
books that I might have otherwise just had in my bookshelf for a month.

------
cschep
Can anyone make any recommendations?

~~~
mechanician
"Programming Collective Intelligence" by Toby Segaran.

~~~
toby
Thanks! I appreciate the support!

~~~
markmywords
Thanks for writing such a great book. One of the treasures in my (ever
growing) collection and I am even citing it in one of my papers I currently
write :)

------
kingtoe
This caught my eye... And then I remembered that my safaribooksonline
subscription lets me read all the o'reilly books I want, and thousands of
other tech books, for $20.00 a month.

For anyone who wants to use this coupon, I'm not sure why you wouldn't just
get yourself a month on safari... or a free trial for that matter.... Any
ideas?

~~~
kanwisher
Reading offline, like on my ipad

------
dpritchett
Strangely this promotion led me to pick up the "MEAP" edition of Clojure in
Action from Manning Publications. I already had The Joy of Clojure and I
wanted to see the other side.

I can't think of anything O'Reilly offers that I want to read right now aside
from maybe Agile Web Development with Rails.

------
CWuestefeld
_Free to Choose ebook deal of the day_

Oddly, "Free to Choose"
([https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Free_to_Choos...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Free_to_Choose)
) is _not_ one of the books that you can buy.

------
Alex63
Seems like this is a popular promotion, based on their website performance. I
wonder if it will make anyone reconsider the recent controversy over Amazon's
pricing for Kindle editions. Seems like lots of people are willing to buy
e-books for $9.99.

~~~
robryan
Yeah at $9.99 it's worth picking up things for a look. At $30-$40 you want to
be sure you'll have the time to read it and it's something useful/
interesting.

~~~
scorpioxy
Exactly. Plus, $30-$40 for an ebook doesn't seem fair to me.

Before ebook prices started coming down, I had stopped buying tech books
because they're very expensive and become obsolete in a few months.

------
anirudh
5/21/2010 — Due to heavy server volume you may experience trouble downloading
your ebook orders.

We expect to have the issue resolved soon. Please continue to check back or
contact our Customer Service: accounts@oreilly.com

------
runevault
Out of curiosity anyone able to download their books yet? The loading data
screen no longer hangs for 20+ seconds, but it still doesn't find the books.

------
dreyfiz
Great suggestions from this thread, thanks all. Wound up getting:

R in a Nutshell, 1Ed

Real World Haskell, 1Ed

iPhone Game Development, 1Ed

Cocoa and Objective-C: Up and Running, 1Ed

JavaScript: The Good Parts, 1Ed

Programming Collective Intelligence, 1Ed

Head First Statistics, 1Ed

Head First Data Analysis, 1Ed

Confessions of a Public Speaker, 1Ed

iPhone 3D Programming, 1Ed

------
rbanffy
I guess they gave themselves a DDoS...

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bitboxer
Hm...Server seems very busy, can't place my order :(

~~~
slantyyz
Yeah I got tossed on checkout too. There's a major nerdgasm going on there.

------
DannoHung
Cool, I've been thinking about getting an eBook version of RWH because I can
just never seem to find the time to read it at home.

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nkassis
They should have made it a 2 hour sale or something, I'm up to 6 books and
need to stop before I get tempted by something else.

------
waterlesscloud
I wonder how many books they sold for smaller languages people are curious
about. Haskell, R, Erlang, etc.

------
metamemetics
I was feeling adventurous and settled on an erlang book.

------
AndrewO
Anyone know if this includes Rough Cuts?

------
ukdm
Microsoft Press titles excluded

~~~
rbanffy
I'm fine with that.

~~~
techsupporter
I'm not. Lots of companies use C#, Visual Studio, or just Windows in general,
and the best books for those topics usually come from MS Press. It would have
been nice to get the C# 2010 book through this deal.

~~~
dpritchett
[http://www.appstorehq.com/microsoft-
visualc-2010stepbystep-i...](http://www.appstorehq.com/microsoft-
visualc-2010stepbystep-iphone-222947/app)

Is this the one you wanted? You can get this for $6 and use some advice from
upthread to convert it to ePub.

