I pay $99/yr for a professional membership in ACM, and as of yesterday, that membership includes complete access to the entire Safari platform. Get it while it's hot, I guess.

We (Manning) are in the process of diversifying our options :)

Just wanted to add, I absolutely love manning tech book's quality. After buying few books from packt, I'm never going back to them.

Always good to hear positive feedback :) Thanks! Any particular books you've enjoyed recently?

I'm in first few chapters of Relevant search book. So far, great!

Completely agree - but have been several times a tech proofreader I know amount of work that it required

This sounds somewhat ominous ... will Manning keep the option of DRM-free individual book purchases going into the future?

Not at all :) I was responding to the criticism of O'Reilly reducing to just two choices - Safari or Amazon.

We're committed to DRM free options wherever possible. We're coming up with some new stuff, but DRM free pdfs and epubs are pretty much our core business.

> We're coming up with some new stuff, but DRM free pdfs and epubs are pretty much our core business.

We love you for that :)

O'Reilly's decision raise an interesting question tough. I bought many books via O'Reilly shop, they are still accessible but for how long? For users, digital distribution is risky. I like it tough, but after seeing such services closing (loosing all for what i have paid for), i tend to be less confident.

They aren't stopping all retail. Just direct to consumer sales. Amazon and brick and mortar stores will still sell O'Reilly books.

Edit: I am uncertain of the eBook / PDF offering at other retailers.

Amazon selling PDFs? Brick and mortar selling PDFs?

Amazon sells Kindle versions so there's DRM. But, Google Play store offers PDF and ePub versions of O'Reilly books.

There are significant problems with both options.

For Amazon, when you buy an eBook, you are essentially given a license to use it. Amazon can revoke that - we've all heard of people moving to another country to see their entire library disappear, only (hopefully) remedied after enough hell was raised on some website.

As for Play Books, lets imagine you are a Android developer working on the next great thing, and you are an ethical person. Still, you can make a mistake. Suspension of an app is considered a strike against the good standing of your developer account: “Additional suspensions of any nature may result in the termination of your developer account, and investigation and possible termination of related Google accounts.”

You would lose everything, eMail, books, etc. So while I don't expect these problems, knowing there is a small possibility, with almost no chance of remedy by a human on the other end, dissuades me from investing lots of money in that ecosystem.

If you are an Android developer it seems like it may be a good idea to use a dedicated Google account for Android development and keeping that separate from your personal email account that you use for Gmail, etc.

Google is very good at linking those and it sounds like people have had their non-developer accounts suspended before.

Correct, I've had a Google account suspension result in 4 linked accounts being suspended. The others were restored after an appeal though.

> we've all heard of people moving to another country to see their entire library disappear

Have we? I've moved between countries and updated my Amazon account a couple of times, and still have everything. It sounds like you're taking about a bug, not licensing.

It's trivial to remove the DRM from Amazon books and save a copy.

It's no longer so trivial since Amazon moved to the KFX format.

It doesn't. O'Reilly customer support just confirmed:

> We do not currently have the DRM free PDF versions available from any online re-sellers.

Whether there is DRM on a kindle book is the publishers decision. For example, none of Tor Books' titles have DRM which means you can extract the beautiful screen resolution illustrations from Brandon Sanderson's books.

Disclaimer: I work for Amazon, but not on anything Kindle related

Is there a way to know which Kindle books have DRM, and which don't, before purchase?

There's no easy way to tell, as far as I know. Some books will mention they're DRM-free in the description, but that's not always the case. There are DRM-free books with no such indication until you've actually purchased them.

It seems more difficult to read programming books on a Kindle than as PDFs. I don't know if it's the lack of scrolling on Kindle or something else. I don't think that I would buy another programming book on Kindle.

> Google Play store offers PDF and ePub versions of O'Reilly books.

Oh, interesting, I wasn't aware of that. Thanks!

Uhm. I bought "Using SQLite" from Google Play a couple of days ago and the PDF that was available is a Google digitization and not a real O'Reilly PDF, so no index and a slightly worse visual quality. Not an acceptable option for me.

RE " .... $399/yr for Safari subscription ..." I only pay $199/yr After the 1st year they sent me this offer ....

They have some summer sales where the price drops to $199/yr for the first year too.

Still, that's a sizable amount in some countries. They could offer direct discounts to students or people from these countries (but I can't find that anywhere, they seem focused on selling to academic institutions only).

I signed up for $199/year, and I think that as long as I keep my membership ongoing, then it is $199/year forever.

wait for black friday, they usually run a half price discount then. Bought my membership then and it renews for the same price.

But you can still buy their digital copies elsewhere like on Amazon or eBooks or Google Play.

Not early release titles that you could buy as the authors continue working on them (please correct me if I'm wrong).

I have bought book(s) that are still not released and have benefitted from them already.

Also the price difference in those websites vs direct from O'Reilly is quite significant. (Twice or more than twice.)

I would have preferred if they would have raised their book prices but kept the same business model.