Last year I subscribed to O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf service. For $9.99 a month, I can read any 3 O'Reilly titles (HTML versions with a very nifty search feature): I can swap books in and out with the caveat that any title has to stay on my shelf for 30 days. A 10-book shelf costs $14.99/month if I want to upgrade at some point.

This is very good for me: it has reduced my spending on tech books (from about $300 a year to $120) that very quickly go out of date as technologies change (I have boxes of them in the garage). This is also good for O'Reilly in 2 ways:

First, O'Reilly's incremental cost of of goods is zero (they don't have to print, ship or accept returns of unsold books), their financial risk is lowered (the penalties for guessing high or low on the number of copies they can sell), they don't have to share fees with middlemen and they have a continuing stream of about $3.30 per title that's almost all margin, vs. a one-time fee that's mostly cost recovery. They reduce costs significantly, lower their risk and generate ongoing revenue instead of one-time fees.

Second, I have all but stopped buying tech titles from publishers other than O'Reilly. O'Reilly has a book about just about any technology I'm likely to need to know about. Since I have the subscription, anytime I want Mac OS X or BSD of Perl or whatever help, I look for the O'Reilly title first. IDG, Osborne and other publishers will have to have a pretty exceptional title to get me to fork over the $50 the usual 1000-page tech book costs.

Two years ago, I all but stopped buying DVDs and CDs, 2 other categories where I have usually spent $1000 a year. The reasons are manifold: for CDs, I hate the price-gouging and the mass-market dreck that the 5 major record companies churn out. Music is not a one-size-(or taste)-fits-all business. My decision was conscious, and has nothing to do with downloading files for free, despite the record company's ongoing fantasy.

Record companies and movie companies hate me, one of their former best customers: every one of my DVDs starts with a huge red 'FBI warning' as if I were a criminal. I'm not a criminal, assholes, I'm your !@#$% CUSTOMER! And you guys, rolling in dough, can't be bothered to make it easy or convenient for me to buy from you, at the same time your hideously over-funded lobbies are attempting to wreck one of the most carefully-balanced concepts in the history of ideas, namely U.S. copyright law. That body of law was such an important reason that America is unique in invention fostered by the free flow of ideas - which free flow has everything to do with my livelihood as a technologist.

So, I don't want to fund DMCA, copyright extension or any of the other crap that RIAA and MPA are so short-sightedly pushing in defense of the markets they've managed to corner. To paraphrase a record company executive, you guys are going after my livelihood, so I guess you won't mind if I stop being part of yours...

Comments 9:55:02 AM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures