Free O’Reilly ebooks for Android
Does the idea of downloading O’Reilly ebooks for free on your Android phone appeal to you? Here’s the very simple instructions:
- Download the Aldiko base app from Android Market
- Still in the market, buy as many O’Reilly ebooks as you fancy
- Open each O’Reilly book and press Menu > Export
- Refund all the O’Reilly books (within 24 hours of install)
- Move the exported EPUB files from the root of your sdcard folder to sdcard/ebooks/import folder using your favourite file managing tool (e.g. ASTRO).
- Open Aldiko, Menu > Import
I now have 20 O’Reilly ebooks available on my phone, for free!
Before you make any judgements about me being a thief or a pirate, please read how I view the situation:
After I’ve read the books, and if they’re any good, I’ll consider paying for them again. For example, I have a purchased copy of “Making Things Happen”, as I feel that it’s a very good read. I also purchased Aldiko Premium, since I want to support the developer for his great work.
Posted in Development by David Carrington at September 8th, 2010.
I think you’re missing the point. This is not very clever; it may not be ‘stealing’ but it certainly is cheap and disrespectful.
I have a natural aversion to spending money on digital goods.
If these books were not priced so low and I didn’t have the ability to refund them then I would not have read or bought any of them. Now in fact I have bought two.
I think that 24Hrs needs to be changed to 15Min as Google changed the refund time.
Nobody knows exactly how people will be making money if they produce digital content and nobody wants to pay for it. Paying for digital goods or services is only one of the possibilities, of course. Another is like Google or broadcast TV– let the ad sponsors pay for the content.
As a rule of thumb, whether you agree or disagree with the approach, you should respect the other party’s wishes. This is why I use Linux rather than Windows. I don’t want to pay for Windows, but it’s wrong to ‘steal’ software, so I don’t use it. They have the right to set a price on their offering, and they also have a right to expect that the general user won’t abuse the money-back refund that any decent company provides.
To me, it seems that O’Reilly highly discounted these ebooks to see whether a low price point can work while the traditional prices for books seem outrageous when applied to ebooks.
Anyway, O’Reilly creates such good content. I would want them to make money and also I would want the authors to make money. If they wanted to give the books away for free, they would! If it turns out that they don’t make any money producing these packages, because people take advantage of some technical loophole, then deals like this won’t be around for long.
I enjoy Windows as an OS. It suits me, and as such, I bought a copy. It was pre-order and thus *heavily* discounted (about 70% off I think). I must admit that if it wasn’t so cheap then I would be much less likely to have made the purchase.
Again, it’s my aversion to paying a high price for digital goods.
To address your points about exploiting or abusing their technical loophole/money back refund, I can only refer you back to my previous comment: they made *more* money out of me than they would have if this loophole wasn’t there.
It is stealing pure and simple. I am sure the author, who probably has kids, and is working on razor thin margins as it is, would love a minute you.
It is even worst that you are espousing a method to cheat this hard working author.