So O’Reilly Media departed from the online book purchasing business recently. Don’t worry, they’re still going to publish books, and videos, just not run a book selling ecommerce site themselves. Basically, they’ll be outsourcing to Amazon, Google Books, etc.
The fundamental reason seems to be that technical book sales have flatlined relative to the burgeoning all you can rent buffet of books, videos, and training material that is Safari. Last year, I sprung for a lifetime (fingers crossed), discounted, annual subscription to Safari. I’m coming up on the anniversary and will probably let the subscription renew, despite it not being particularly cheap. There is actually a metric crap ton of content that interests me, without even searching too hard. Sort of like a Spotify subscription for nerd stuff.
O’Reilly and I go way back. All the way back to the printed documentation for the X Window System. As a summer intern, I got stuck implementing an X server on the OS/2 platform. Lucky me, but those books were the reference.
When I read the news, I sort of went “hunh” then “enh”. There was some consternation over at Hacker News due to reasonably concerned, anti-DRM holdouts, but I think the eminently respectable Scott Meyers has the right analysis:
My guess is that a component of O’Reilly’s no-DRM policy was a hope that it would distinguish O’Reilly from other publishers and would attract buyers who felt strongly about DRM. Whether it did that, I don’t know, but O’Reilly’s decision to stop selling individual products at its web site suggests that DRM (or the lack thereof) is not an important differentiator for most buyers of technical books and videos.
All we can expect in this industry, is change.