O'Reilly Radar TOC

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.

After O'Reilly moved to DRM-free books, their 2009 sales went up by 104% http://toc.oreilly.com/2010/01/2009-oreilly-ebook-revenue-up-104-percent.html

In other interviews, he seemed confident that DRM wasn't worth it
https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0411/focus-tim-oreilly-media-e-book-antipiracy-steal-this.html

Perhaps some part of the equation has changed since then. I'm looking forward a deeper analysis of the business reasons for this.

I'm also interested to hear what more authors think - I wonder how many agree with Martin Kleppmann (Designing Data Intensive Applications) https://twitter.com/martinkl/status/880336943980085248

This independence day weekend there were a lot of sales, so I purchased:

* "Programming Clojure, Third Edition" from pragprog (30% off sale)

* The entire collection of "Enthusiast's Guide to ..." from rockynook (each for $10)

* "The Quick Python Book 3e", "Serverless Architectures on AWS", "Event Streams in Action", "Get Programming with Haskell" from Manning (50% off)

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 full cart with $100 worth of stuff before I could purchase!

EDIT: OReilly catalog seemed large & redundant with publishers (packt) offering the same materials on…

It sounds expensive until you try to estimate the cost of my book collection. Double cripe.

The number of O'Reilly books that can be bought for $359 is depressingly small. If and when O'Reilly fully supports Kindle (and vice versa) Kindles will really start flying off the shelves:

http://toc.oreilly.com/2008/06/select-oreilly-books-soon-on-kindle-and-as-drm-free-digital-bundle.html

UPDATE: Of course, some of the book pricing is going to need a reality adjustment. $10 more than a used paper copy is too much. And the catalog could use some proofreading too: did you know that Don Roberts wrote "Refactoring"?

http://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Improving-Design-Existing-Code/dp/B000OZ0N4Y/ref=pd_sim_kinc_2