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Did piracy really kill OReilly's previous business model? I was sad when they morphed into a weird subscription service

I can find a specific reference, but it they made a bid deal of being DRM free a decade ago.

If ebook sales where working well, I suspect they wouldn't have gotten rid of them.

They still sell DRM free books, just through other stores like Google Play.

The reason they switched to subscriptions was because of the cost of running an ebook store and the low ROI.