Of all the firms that don’t get electronic books, I’m kind of surprised to see O’Reilly Books in there.
All I want is one thing — an e-book version of Jon Udell’s 1999 book Practical Internet Groupware. This is a book that, to my knowledge, has been out-of-print for several years.
So I go to O’Reilly’s Safari site to see if I can purchase it there and I can, if I’m willing to pay ridiculous prices.
First, I’d have to sign up for a $19.99/month subscript to the Safari site. Then, I could pay to download the chapters in PDF format (because I don’t want to permanently subscribe to Safari) for an additional $22. Even if it was just $22 to download, that’d be a bit silly to pay for a 6 year old book on groupware.
Instead, I ended up ordering a couple copies for $4+shipping from a used bookseller I found on Amazon. Now both O’Reilly and I are losers. I’d really prefer to have an electronic version rather than paper, and I imagine O’Reilly would prefer that it have my money rather than the used bookseller.
Stupid.