O'Reilly's Decision and Its DRM Implication
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.<p>After O'Reilly moved to DRM-free books, their 2009 sales went up by 104% <a href="http://toc.oreilly.com/2010/01/2009-oreilly-ebook-revenue-up-104-percent.html" rel="nofollow">http://toc.oreilly.com/2010/01/2009-oreilly-ebook-revenue-up...</a><p>In other interviews, he seemed confident that DRM wasn't worth it
<a href="https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0411/focus-tim-oreilly-media-e-book-antipiracy-steal-this.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0411/focus-tim-oreilly-me...</a><p>Perhaps some part of the equation has changed since then. I'm looking forward a deeper analysis of the business reasons for this.<p>I'm also interested to hear what more authors think - I wonder how many agree with Martin Kleppmann (Designing Data Intensive Applications) <a href="https://twitter.com/martinkl/status/880336943980085248" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/martinkl/status/880336943980085248</a><p>This independence day weekend there were a lot of sales, so I purchased:<p>* "Programming Clojure, Third Edition" from pragprog (30% off sale)<p>* The entire collection of "Enthusiast's Guide to ..."  from rockynook (each for $10)<p>* "The Quick Python Book 3e", "Serverless Architectures on AWS", "Event Streams in Action", "Get Programming with Haskell" from Manning (50% off)<p>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 <i>full cart</i> with $100 worth of stuff before I could purchase!<p>EDIT: OReilly catalog seemed large & redundant with publishers (packt) offering the same materials on their sites. Some like Wiley / MKP only offered very few items from their catalogs. Others like Rosenfeld / rockynook / no starch now provide DRM free options directly from their sites. I'm hoping at least OReilly reconsiders selling their Animal books again.