For the last two years I’ve had an O’Reilly subscription. Their offer is quite attractive with unlimited access to books not only by O’Reilly but also Manning and others. The catalog is just enourmous and covers pretty much every technical book around software engineering et al. that I might ever want to read. There are also tons of other learning resources in there like conference recordings and webinars, but I’m mostly there for the books. Unfortunately, I cannot read technical books fast and definitely not fast enough to make the subscription be worth $500 per year.

Another problem for me is the usability of the mobile client. I mostly read books on my tablet but also like to use some spare time during commutes to make some progress on my phone. The synchronization there is extremely spotty and the app, when being evicted and reloaded by the operating system, throws me more often than not back to the start screen instead of reopening the previously open book at the right page. I also haven’t found a theme that I enjoy as much as the ones offered by Apple Books or the Kindle app and so reading hasn’t been all that enjoyable for me.

All of this together will most likely not make me renew my subscription for the new year. Given the price, it will be probably cheaper for me to buy only the books that I want from Kobo et al. where I can get O’Reilly books without DRM and keep them beyond any subscription limit. I also just noticed that I still have some credits left from the time I’ve had a Manning subscription 😂