I'm a big fan of the O'Reilly books -- probably because I've been buying computer books for a long, long time and O'Reilly has consistently delivered good products.
But something bothers me about them: the pricing on the O'Reilly web site is not just a little higher, but a lot higher than what's on Amazon. This applies not just to physical books, but to e-books as well.
The difference is so dramatic that it is better to buy the Kindle version of an e-book and use the $4.99 upgrade on the O'Reilly web site to upgrade to the full, unlocked version of the e-book than it is to just buy the e-book from them.
I'm sure it's the nature of the business for publishers -- you cannot undercut your retailers -- but it doesn't make a lot of sense on the Internet these days. Somebody needs to figure out how to solve this. Because until then, Amazon is going to keep getting a piece of my O'Reilly ebook purchases for no good reason -- I'd rather buy the book from the publisher direct and let them use the money to acquire new & improved content.
So much for the Internet and disintermediation...
Thursday, August 9, 2012
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