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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

Quite a few people seem to be under the impression that O'Reilly DRM-free ePub and PDF books are no longer available, or maybe are only available now with DRM.

Not so.

O'Reilly stopped selling those on its own site, but they still produce them and sell them through retailers.

For example, ebooks.com carries them in both DRM-free ePub and DRM-free PDF [1].

When searching at ebooks.com, you can add "Format:18" to your keywords to search for DRM-free PDF, or "Format:17" to search for DRM-free ePub.

[1] https://www.ebooks.com/searchapp/searchresults.net?sortBy=So...

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Yeah, but the prices are ridiculous. The O'Reilly books in the recent years were clearly priced taking into account that most people would have taken advantage of their perpetual 50% or periodic 60% discounts. At full price they are absurd.

I've been following the eBooks.com newsletter for several months, but they seem to have at most rare discounts of 20% (understandable since that's probably close to what they get paid).

Even if I managed to overcome my distaste for O'Reilly since their move and if worthwhile new titles kept being published, I would be very reluctant to spend those sums for a single ebook.

Personally I've been "lucky" enough to spend thousands of dollars on them in the last years and there are few titles that I'm still missing.

Here's what's probably all the information available on the situation for O'Reilly's ebooks: http://support.oreilly.com/oreilly/topics/bring-back-pdf-ebo...

Wow, that is great, thank you for posting this.

Just the other day I've torrented a PDF that I couldn't buy from O'Reilly.

For O'Reilly PDFs, are these conversions from another format or sourced directly from O'Reilly ?

Dunno for ebooks.com (whose prices are significantly higher), but on Google Playstore, ePub is clearly not sourced from O'Reilly. Line heights are not even consistent.

When I bought from Oreilly they maintained a download anytime list, and sent me free update lists. Who if anyone does this now?

The Pragmatic Bookshelf at pragprog.com still does.

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