O’Reilly Media has stopped retailing books directly on its ecommerce store
Sent this to Support at O&#x27;Reilly after reading their (to me, insane) e-mail.<p>Hi O&#x27;Reilly,<p>Just so you know - you&#x27;ve completely lost a customer. After years - decades really - of a highly dedicated customer (whose friends have written books you have published) you threw it all down the drain in one e-mail.<p>I will never purchase another book published by O&#x27;Reilly, or any company associated with O&#x27;Reilly, or associated with O&#x27;Reilly himself or any of the executives at O&#x27;Reilly. I sure as heck am not going to buy any technical books from O&#x27;Reilly by Amazon.<p>The things I liked from O&#x27;Reilly, now gone, are:<p>1. PDF, ePub and Mobi formats, all DRM free, so I could read them in the ideal format for each device I read them on. And, I have a lot of devices: several Macs and PCs, several iPads, several Kindles (used almost exclusively for fiction as technical works are horrible in non-PDF), several phones of various kinds. I could put both the ePub and PDF into iBooks (not my favorite app, but it does sync) and read the ePub on the subway if I wanted, and the PDF on the desktop and iPad (cause, as I said, ePub is terrible for technical books). I like my fully properly typeset color, indexed PDFs!<p>2. Buy it once, own it. Did you ever see me subscribe to Safari? No? Ever wonder why not? For the same reason that I don&#x27;t use Adobe products anymore except Lightroom (which is still a purchase not a subscription), and why I dropped JetBrains when they moved to their subscription model and then re-joined them when they went to &quot;Subscription + keep your start of subscription version forever&quot;. I don&#x27;t rent stuff. I buy it and own it. Plain and simple.<p>I&#x27;m glad that there are other publishers out there like Pragmatic Press and Apress that have been publishing good content, because you just lost a highly dedicated customer who always shopped O&#x27;Reilly first even for non-O&#x27;Reilly books. Congratulations, and shame on you.