
Ask HN: Did you stop buying O'Reilly books after they ended their online shop? - bioinformatics
Now that&#x27;s everything is on Safari, and there&#x27;s not even book releases on O&#x27;Reilly&#x27;s site, did you guys stopped buying&#x2F;accessing&#x2F;learning from their books?<p>I am usually more connected to Manning and PragPub ATM.
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tedmiston
I've had a Safari Books subscription since before they closed the shop.
Unlimited access to so many books is just invaluable. Also being able to
access books before they are officially released.

I still occasionally buy a random tech book but just a couple per year vs
viewing dozens to hundreds per year on Safari.

I'm a big fan of Pragmatic as well. A lot (all?) of their stuff is on Safari
[1].

[1]:
[https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/publisher/pragmati...](https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/publisher/pragmatic-
bookshelf/)

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Someone1234
I liked Safari, but I stopped buying computing books in general. The
information contained within is often outdated almost immediately, misses a
lot of nuance found in discussion (e.g. Stackoverflow), and is often harder to
search than other digital resources.

There's a couple of books that I still buy, but the concepts contained within
are evergreen (e.g. people management, project scheduling, Windows Internals,
etc). Web development just moves too fast, even if you're stuck supporting
IE11.

~~~
akulbe
This is _WHY_ I primarily look for pre-release stuff on Safari. I consider it
one of the best investments a tech person can make in their own continuing
education, because by the time something gets to print, it's often obsolete
already.

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andyhnj
I used to buy both print and ebook format books from O'Reilly from time to
time. I now have a Safari subscription (via my ACM membership), so I've
stopped buying computer books almost entirely. Safari isn't perfect, but it's
got a lot of books, covering most of the computing-related subjects that I'm
interested in. I'd rather have DRM-free PDFs, but Safari is good enough for
now.

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ocdtrekkie
Well, technically yes, but technically no. I definitely didn't subscribe to
Safari, but I still pick up a significant volume of O'Reilly books via Humble
Bundle. (This bundle is still going for the next five days:
[https://www.humblebundle.com/books/web-design-development-
bo...](https://www.humblebundle.com/books/web-design-development-books))

I will only buy ebooks if they are either totally DRM-free or "watermarked". I
have no desire for subscription access, login-required ebook schemes, etc. I
had previously very much classified O'Reilly as one of the "good ones" for
offering their books DRM-free, and mostly had to remove it as my go-to place
to find books I need. Currently I lean towards Informit/Pearson if I need to
buy a specific subject book on the spot.

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thijsvandien
I used to buy over a dozen ebooks every year, but closing their store meant
they lost me as a customer completely.

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jackgolding
Yep I went on and had a look the other day because I used to buy a book from
them every 2 months but I haven't looked at their books for 2 years their
website made this nearly impossible.

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Endy
I never started buying. My local public libraries got enough copies that I
could read them when they came out in dead-tree.

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Sevii
I buy paper copies on amazon.

