Hi,

I noticed that O'Reilly books at amazon.com are 30 percent off. It's great! But why? Is that the way I should order O'Reilly books?

Best Regards,
Josh

Hi Josh,

We don't care where people get our books, just that they get them. The way we see it, booksellers, whether they're online or bricks-and-mortar, are not our competitors. They're our partners in getting our books to you, the reader. Booksellers use a vareity of incentives to attract buyers, including discounting. O'Reilly could match or beat the prices offered by our resellers, but that sort of practice would obliterate the smaller bookstores and pit us against those who are helping us put our books out there.

We recently added a pull-down menu of online resellers to our book catalog pages; we invite you to shop around. Take a look at Unix Power Tools, 3rd Edition, for example. The booksellers list includes UK- and Canadian-based stores, as well as US retailers, and selecting a store will bring up the same book on the reseller's Web site.

In general, we feel that our book prices are lower than they could be; market research bears this out. But as Tim O'Reilly said a few years ago in Beyond the Book, "At O'Reilly, we believe that the core of our business is to transfer knowledge from people who have it to people who need it. Yes, we are in business to make money, but this is a kind of housekeeping, not the purpose of the business."

Mary Hubben

Got a compliment, complaint, or suggestion? Let us know!

Return to: letters.oreilly.com