O'Reilly is selling any eBook for $9.99 today

http://oreilly.com/store/index.html

by brandon • 16 years ago

78 77 16 years ago

oreilly.com

ukdm• 16 years ago

Microsoft Press titles excluded

rbanffy2• 16 years ago

I'm fine with that.

techsupporter• 16 years ago

I'm not. Lots of companies use C#, Visual Studio, or just Windows in general, and the best books for those topics usually come from MS Press. It would have been nice to get the C# 2010 book through this deal.

cschep• 16 years ago

Can anyone make any recommendations?

mechanician• 16 years ago

"Programming Collective Intelligence" by Toby Segaran.

fredoliveira2• 16 years ago

Great recommendation. I personally enjoyed that book tremendously.

toby• 16 years ago

Thanks! I appreciate the support!

kaykay• 16 years ago

I just got a copy of this, meaning to read this for a long time.

fredoliveira2• 16 years ago

Here's a few recent buys:

  - Javascript: The Good Parts (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748/)
  - High Performance Javascript (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596802806/)

It's always a good time to buy a few classics:

  - Information Architecture for the WWW (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596527341/)
  - Javascript: The definitive guide (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596101992/)
  - Beautiful Code (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510046/)

subsection1h• 16 years ago

> Javascript: The definitive guide

I'm waiting for the 6th edition:

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596805531

mattyb2• 16 years ago

I'm buying 'R in a Nutshell' and 'The Art of Debugging with GDB and DDD'.

Jun8• 16 years ago

Their server seems to be swamped. There's nothing like a unresponsive server to sober you up from a whimsical book purchase on a FRiday.

I was trying to buy:

* Making Things Talk (great into to networking with low-level HW)

* The Best of Instructables (excellent selection of mostly simple projects, includes IKEA hacking)

slantyyz4• 16 years ago

Nice choices.

I guess 70% savings is always enough to get everyone to take down their server.

johkra• 16 years ago

I'm getting Confessions of a Public Speaker, I was long interested in this book.

tmsh• 16 years ago

97 Things Every Programmer Should Know (ed. Kevlin Henney) is sort of nice reading. All pretty smart ideas so far, imho. Though I haven't finished reading it.

(Like a lot of O'Reilly books these days, it's available in a free (legal) form on the internet too http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Contri... )

runevault3• 16 years ago

I grabbed Hadoop: The Definitive Guide Tomcat: The definitive Guide 2nd ed (this one I have access to via ACM membership but those rotate out potentially so eh) Head first Statistics (my math skills are beyond rusty, and the head first books tend to be good.

However either due to overload or something, while I was able to place my order, the books are not showing up in my available list yet. Figure I'll give them until tomorrow then throw an email at them asking what's wrong.

mattyb2• 16 years ago

Yep, same here. My order went through but the books haven't showed up yet.

sriramk• 16 years ago

My book 'Programming Windows Azure' just came out today. :) I feel bad about plugging it here but hey, I put heart & soul into it for the last one year so I feel justified :).

Obligatory O'Reilly and Amazon links

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596801984 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596801971

If it helps, I need to point out that my book is chock-full of Star Trek, BSG and Monty Python references and the surprising backstory of how Windows Azure's orginal code name came to be. :)

swombat• 16 years ago

If I had an iPad I might consider it to see if I can read on that, but I've found that I only ever read books when printed on the pulped, mangled, processed bodies of brutally murdered trees.

wwortiz• 16 years ago

Especially for technical books where I end up flipping around pages back and forth something that the computer probably will never be able to model intuitively.

Though I must say I like my kindle enough that it is readable for normal books.

But there is just something about paper :)

AndrejM• 16 years ago

Yes, if only such technology existed where you could swap between two bookmarks with a keypress. Or where you could jump to a particular page by just typing in a number.

tzs• 16 years ago

From what I've seen, O'Reilly material works well on iPad. I have a subscription to Safari Library, and have tried using it three ways on my iPad.

1. For those books that support the HTML view, I've read them in the browser from the Safari Library web site. These have been excellent, including diagrams and code snippets. One or two books have had slight formatting problems (a line of example code not wrapping).

2. For books that don't support the HTML view, or books that I've downloaded as PDFs (part of the my subscription is a certain number of "download tokens" that can be redeemed to download chapters or whole books), I've read then in GoodReader. This has worked out fine.

3. Finally, they offer some books for download in EPub format. I've tried those in iBooks, and they've been good. I've also used the free program Calibre to convert some of the PDFs I downloaded to EPub and they have worked fine.

I am quite pleased with the combination of O'Reilly Safari Library and my iPad.

Oh, they've also announced that this summer there will be a Safari Library iPad application. That should be interesting.

jrockway3• 16 years ago

Why would an iPad help? It still has the eyeball-melting backlight, and it has a glossy screen, so you have to read through a reflection.

There's a reason why people like e-ink-based ebook readers so much. They may not have games, but they are really good for reading ebooks. (Though I admit that the normal Kindle is not so great for books that have diagrams.)

Terretta4• 16 years ago

I have a Kindle DX. Love it for reading research PDFs from start to finish.

I had also figured it would be fantastic to shrink the shelf space for tech books, and always have those books at hand. Big downside that doesn't hit you till you try to use it for this purpose: the e-ink can't page flip fast enough to be useful.

Readers on the iPad (iBooks, even Kindle app) don't have this issue.

bjelkeman-again2• 16 years ago

I have read more than 3000 screens (pages?) on my iPad so far and my eyeballs have not melted yet. I think it is quite a personal thing whether you like using an iPad for reading a lot of material or not.

I find it a lot easier on my eyes than my Macbook Air, for reading, not sure why. But there it is.

Herring• 16 years ago

Goodreader (plus a couple other pdf apps) can darken the screen so it's almost like glossy paper

http://i.imgur.com/h5NEi.jpg

kmfrk• 16 years ago

In general I agree, but pocket-reference e-books on your mobile shouldn't be scoffed at.

slantyyz4• 16 years ago

Exactly. If you're an on-the-move consultant who works with a bunch of different technologies, the last thing you want is more stuff to carry.

bitboxer• 16 years ago

Hm...Server seems very busy, can't place my order :(

slantyyz4• 16 years ago

Yeah I got tossed on checkout too. There's a major nerdgasm going on there.

ydant2• 16 years ago

For anyone else trying to find this out and finding the site to be amazingly slow:

Use coupon code FAVFA - prices won't be discounted until check-out.

It works for multiple books, although the headline looks like it's for a single book.

Terretta4• 16 years ago

> it works for multiple books

FYI: Looks like ordering multiple books created issues getting delivery of yesterday's purchases. I also lost the discount after checkout. Today's order pricing isn't what was reflected at checkout.

Today the two titles I bought in two orders are listed as "registered" under the registered books area.

Order status on both orders reflects "BOOKED", but shipped is 0, download link is not active, and the books are not listed in the downloads section.

One purchase shows the discount, the other reflects full price without discount.

An email to O'Reilly auto-responded with this:

> Thank you for contacting O'Reilly Media Customer Service. We are experiencing a very heavy volume of orders due to our recent promotion. This is affecting the delivery and access of your electronic media. Please be patient and keep checking your account.

TL;DR: Buyers should double-check orders to see what was actually charged.

Terretta4• 16 years ago

O'Reilly is catching up, and fixing order discounts too:

_____________________

I apologize for the delay in getting back to you. I checked your account and you now have access. You can download your ebook here:

https://members.oreilly.com/account/emedia

There were issues with our servers on Friday due to high loads, and we've been working to make sure everyone received the content they purchased.

We have refunded you the amount that you would have saved if the discount code was applied to one of your orders. Please allow 5-7 business days for the credit to appear on your statement.

Thank you again for your orders and for your understanding. Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance.

Best Regards, O'Reilly Media Customer Service

_____________________

Thanks, O'Reilly.

rbanffy2• 16 years ago

I guess they gave themselves a DDoS...

CWuestefeld• 16 years ago

Free to Choose ebook deal of the day

Oddly, "Free to Choose" (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Free_to_Choos... ) is not one of the books that you can buy.

AndrewO• 16 years ago

Anyone know if this includes Rough Cuts?

just_the_tip2• 16 years ago

You can get $5 O'Reilly EPUBs from the App Store everyday.

Extracting an epub from an iPhone app is easy. First you unzip the .ipa file. Then you cd to Payload/*/book. Finally, you zip up the files to an .epub file: zip -X ~/book.epub mimetype && zip -r9DX ~/book.epub META-INF OEBPS.

mimetype must be first in the archive for validity, which you can test with EpubCheck.

ydant2• 16 years ago

Interesting. I just checked on the Android Google Market and found several of the books I was considering were just $5.

They are in multi-file HTML format inside the APK, so this is even cheaper and given I wanted them on the Android phone/tablet anyway, easier.

Even better the eBook app O'Reilly delivers has an "Export to ePub" button that will send it to an ePub on your sdcard.

anotherperson• 16 years ago

This is definitely a hacky way to go. I just tried it with Matz’s Ruby book. Reading it with Stanza on OSX is just about the ugliest digital reading experience outside of scanned text.

Oh well, it only set me back 5 bucks.

just_the_tip2• 16 years ago

It's an issue of using a subpar client, not a subpar format. I have yet to find a decent epub reader for a computer. Stanza for iPhone, iBooks, and dedicated hardware render epubs beautifully.

dpritchett2• 16 years ago

Strangely this promotion led me to pick up the "MEAP" edition of Clojure in Action from Manning Publications. I already had The Joy of Clojure and I wanted to see the other side.

I can't think of anything O'Reilly offers that I want to read right now aside from maybe Agile Web Development with Rails.

DannoHung2• 16 years ago

Cool, I've been thinking about getting an eBook version of RWH because I can just never seem to find the time to read it at home.

dtf• 16 years ago

Exciting headline; miserable experience.

We're sorry, an error has occurred in our application.

So now I've finally given up after the tenth attempt. I guess O'Reilly won't be selling me that copy of Building Scalable Websites after all.

DannoHung2• 16 years ago

My order went through, but I can't access my book :(

abronte• 16 years ago

Same here, when I go to the "emedia" page, it sits there loading for a good 3 minutes, then says I don't have anything to download.

narainmg• 16 years ago

I called up their customer service and they mentioned that it's not showing up because the servers are under heavy load. The lady on the other end of their customer service line was really nice and I have no doubt the ebook will show up in ours accounts eventually.

kingtoe• 16 years ago

This caught my eye... And then I remembered that my safaribooksonline subscription lets me read all the o'reilly books I want, and thousands of other tech books, for $20.00 a month.

For anyone who wants to use this coupon, I'm not sure why you wouldn't just get yourself a month on safari... or a free trial for that matter.... Any ideas?

kanwisher• 16 years ago

Reading offline, like on my ipad

psyklic2• 16 years ago

Their website says $42.99/month for new subscriptions!

nkassis• 16 years ago

They should have made it a 2 hour sale or something, I'm up to 6 books and need to stop before I get tempted by something else.

Alex63• 16 years ago

Seems like this is a popular promotion, based on their website performance. I wonder if it will make anyone reconsider the recent controversy over Amazon's pricing for Kindle editions. Seems like lots of people are willing to buy e-books for $9.99.

robryan• 16 years ago

Yeah at $9.99 it's worth picking up things for a look. At $30-$40 you want to be sure you'll have the time to read it and it's something useful/ interesting.

scorpioxy• 16 years ago

Exactly. Plus, $30-$40 for an ebook doesn't seem fair to me.

Before ebook prices started coming down, I had stopped buying tech books because they're very expensive and become obsolete in a few months.

xsmasher• 16 years ago

These are technical books that retail for $30-$60; so $9 is a great price.

Amazon is charging $12-$13 for some novels that sell in hardback for $15, and $6.99 for some novels that are $7.99 in paperback. That's not such a great deal.

dreyfiz• 16 years ago

Great suggestions from this thread, thanks all. Wound up getting:

R in a Nutshell, 1Ed

Real World Haskell, 1Ed

iPhone Game Development, 1Ed

Cocoa and Objective-C: Up and Running, 1Ed

JavaScript: The Good Parts, 1Ed

Programming Collective Intelligence, 1Ed

Head First Statistics, 1Ed

Head First Data Analysis, 1Ed

Confessions of a Public Speaker, 1Ed

iPhone 3D Programming, 1Ed

waterlesscloud• 16 years ago

I wonder how many books they sold for smaller languages people are curious about. Haskell, R, Erlang, etc.

runevault3• 16 years ago

Out of curiosity anyone able to download their books yet? The loading data screen no longer hangs for 20+ seconds, but it still doesn't find the books.

metamemetics• 16 years ago

I was feeling adventurous and settled on an erlang book.

slantyyz4• 16 years ago

I think there are some valuable lessons to be learned by this sale for O'Reilly, tech publishers and authors.

* 9.99 standard pricing will result in incredibly high sales volumes (the servers would not nearly have been overloaded if everyone wasn't clamoring to get their purchases in before the deadline)

* Publishers and authors need to decide whether they want larger margins w/low volumes - I am of the understanding that selling 5k copies is considered a best seller in the tech market - instead of lower margins with higher volumes. I'm hoping that the results of yesterday's sale might make them consider the first point above.

It would be interesting to see if O'Reilly released some statistics on book sales in the wake of yesterday's server bloodbath.

Myself, I bought a pile of books that I otherwise would not have bought. I have an O'Reilly Safari subscription that is already saving me tons of money, and the low price just pushed me over the edge to buy some local copies of books that I might have otherwise just had in my bookshelf for a month.

anirudh• 16 years ago

5/21/2010 — Due to heavy server volume you may experience trouble downloading your ebook orders.

We expect to have the issue resolved soon. Please continue to check back or contact our Customer Service: accounts@oreilly.com

O'Reilly is selling any eBook for $9.99 today

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