

Save 50% on All O'Reilly Ebooks and Videos - espeed
http://shop.oreilly.com/category/deals/b2s-special.do

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film42
Maybe this is bad to say, but whenever it comes to "me needing a book" the
first thing I do is google "$BOOK_NAME pdf" and check it out.

There is a catch though.. if I find the book a good asset, then I make sure to
buy it, but otherwise it just doesn't make sense to gamble $20+ on a book that
will be outdated in a year, unlike literature.

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polynomial
This is pretty unnecessary here.

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samuel
BTW, Oreilly books can be bought on Google play(epub only) by less than 4 eur.
Not the newest ones, though.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=O%27Reilly+M...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=O%27Reilly+Media)

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benjamincburns
I'd love to see them do a Steam-style sale where all eBooks are $0.99 for 24h
(or something similar).

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jacobbudin
O'Reilly uses a department store pricing structure.

There's almost always a sale, and for eBooks, the sale price is usually not
much cheaper than Amazon.com's (or other sellers) "everyday" price. Only
suckers pay full-price for their eBooks.

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ghc
It's silly to keep posting every O'Reilly eBook sale to HN. This is basically
just free advertising for them. The 50% discount is nothing special: If you
sign up for a membership you get a permanent buy-one-get-one-free discount
that O'Reilly interprets as a 50% discount on each book. So just sign up for a
membership, wait until you have two books you want to buy, and get a 50%
discount without having to wait for a sale.

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diab0lic
If I'm not mistaken, and I may well be, you can actually use that code on a
single book and it'll work just fine as a 50% off as well. So basically you
can get 50% off at any given time, the sales are completely a marketing
technique.

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mjhoy
I just picked up _Understanding Computation_ and, having made it through the
first two chapters at this point, heartily recommend it. If anyone wants to
have a little reading group, I'd be interested.

[http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920025481.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920025481.do)

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tomstuart
Author here. Thanks for the recommendation! There’s already a reading group in
London
([http://lanyrd.com/series/compbookclub/](http://lanyrd.com/series/compbookclub/)),
but that may not be of any use to you.

If anyone else is interested in the book, there's more information at
[http://computationbook.com/](http://computationbook.com/).

~~~
mjhoy
Absolutely. I'm glad you wrote it, seems like an unexpected way to approach
the subject, and I can see where e.g. this comment[1] comes from. But I think
it's quite valuable and inspires me (lacking any CS degree) to pursue further
study.

[1]:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1isawq/understa...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1isawq/understanding_computation/cb7r54k)

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prawks
I wish they'd have some sales on physical books. Maybe it's just my
traditional thinking, but I have a hard time paying $20+ for a pdf. I
understand the publisher needs money, the author has to eat, and the printing
costs aren't really a whole ton that you can reduce the price with, but it
still just doesn't sit right with me.

I feel like and old curmudgeon.

Side edit: In what kind of strange world does the 2nd edition of an eBook
still fetch $32 while the 3rd edition is $36?

[http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780735618794.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780735618794.do)

[http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0790145385512.do?code=B2S3](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0790145385512.do?code=B2S3)

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Refefer
I'm with you: I like good old dead tree books for so many reasons such as
writing in the margins. They should follow Manning books philosophy and also
discount physical books as well, a feature which has resulted in my acquiring
10+ books by them.

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soedgy
>dead tree books

Go back to reddit, kid.

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freehunter
>Go back to reddit, kid.

The one-hour-old account says to the two year old account.

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haraball
O'Reilly is having sale and discounts so often that I avoid buying books at
the full price while waiting for a coupon. This often ends with me forgetting
about the book and not buying it at all.

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kops
Same here. But on rare occasions when I do avail the buy-one-get-one-free
offer, the second book invariably goes unread.

Also does anyone know why these 50% discount offers are limited to ebooks
only?

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cmaggard
Because the margin is obviously higher on ebooks than print books. I imagine
that more profit is made on an ebook sale at 50% off than a print book at full
price.

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pydanny
As soon as you involve Amazon, that's surprisingly not true. Really.

O'Reilly makes more on e-book sales directly through their on-line store then
they do on print. However, every e-book they sell via Amazon, their margins
are very, very different. Here's a rough guide for a $40 book:

* O'Reilly E-Book Online Store: Approx 99% margin or $39.60

* O'Reilly Store selling print book (bulk print discount assumed): 95% margin or $38.00

* Amazon selling print book (bulk print discount assumed): Approx 90% margin or $36.00

* Amazon selling kindle e-book: 35% margin or $14.00 (minus the Amazon processing fee so it's actually worse)

Odds are the bulk of O'Reilly e-book sales are probably done on Amazon, where
the margin is AWFUL. The constant huge sales by O'Reilly are a way to recoup
the painful margins insisted upon by Amazon.

Yeah, Amazon makes boatloads off of kindle book sales.

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kops
<quote> * O'Reilly Store selling print book (bulk print discount assumed): 95%
margin or $38.00 </quote>

Is that really the kind of margins they operate at or is that a typo?

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thefrostytruth
No. Those numbers above are ill-informed.

But yes, the average _print_ costs for a single-color book per unit are in the
2-4 dollar range (that is, manufacturing alone, no design, marketing,
editing).

And how would it be possible for Amazon to "keep their lights on" selling
physical books at 40% off list price, if they pay O'Reilly $36 for a $40 book?
Amazon buys from O'Reilly and most other pubs at 60% off, non-returnable. So
the math for the publishers' take from Amazon on physical books looks like
this:

[list price] * [.4] - [print costs / overhead] - [author royalty]

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kops
Thanks. I was mixing up margin with pre-tax profit.

