Ask HN: Did you stop buying O'Reilly books after they ended their online shop?

[bioinformatics]

Now that's everything is on Safari, and there's not even book releases on O'Reilly's site, did you guys stopped buying/accessing/learning from their books?

I am usually more connected to Manning and PragPub ATM.

[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...

[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 The information contained within is often outdated almost immediately, misses a lot of nuance found in discussion (e.g. Stackoverflow), and is often harder to search than other digital resources.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.

[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.

[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...)

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.

[thijsvandien]

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

[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.

[Endy]

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

[Sevii]

I buy paper copies on amazon.