O’Reilly DRMless High Quality Technical Ebooks

O’Reilly is one of my very favorite technical book publishers, right up there with Peach Pit and Take Control Ebooks. O’Reilly earned a reputation almost immediately for reliable, useful high quality books about operating systems, development processes and procedures, programming and scripting languages, and quality books about creating for the Web. They’re the publisher with the nifty animal covers. They also realized very quickly the importance of the Web, and of community, and that it was both possible and worth taking the time to produce digital versions of their printed books. I beta tested Safari Books Online, the O’Reilly digital subscription service way back when, and am still impressed with their policies and the quality and utility of the content and the user experience.

I note, by the way, that O’Reilly Ebooks have all the quality of their print books, and no DRM. Here’s the official O’Reilly statement:

When you buy an ebooks thru oreilly.com you get lifetime access to the book, and whenever possible we provide it to you in four, DRM-free file formats — PDF, .epub, Kindle-compatible .mobi, and Android .apk ebook — that you can use on the devices of your choice. Our ebook files are fully searchable, and you can cut-and-paste and print them. We also alert you when we’ve updated the files with corrections and additions.

Initially the books were all only available in high quality easily navigable .PDFs; now O’Reilly is releasing books in “bundles” with multiple DRMless file formats:

When you purchase an ebook bundle (currently available on a select set of titles as part of a pilot project), you’ll get access to all three of the formats we’re currently supporting. Since we began selling PDF versions of many of our titles, we’ve offered free updates to reflect published changes in the books; the same will apply to the Ebook bundle, which will replace the PDF option on those titles in the pilot program.

You can find a complete list of O’Reilly titles with sample chapters here. The books available as ebooks are clearly marked.