Which is fine but they ruined their direct DRM-free sales. You used to get access to a PDF, epub, and mobi version of a book with no DRM. They even conveniently allowed you to sync your purchases to Dropbox. It was awesome.

Now you have to hope something g you're interested in ends up in a Humble Bundle or something. The situation is worse in every way for a end users.

It would be such a dream if I could get an ebook, pdf, and physical copy. I love O'Reilly books and have been lucky to have access the last few years because of school.

They used to do a "digital upgrade" where you could get the digital version of a book if you had the physical copy. There was no verification on their end and it was something like $5 a book. It was an awesome way to upgrade your library.

They can't have even lost money if people were just claiming to own books to get the cheap price. Their marginal cost for the PDFs was effectively zero so at $5 they were making plenty of money on them. At the time a PDF only copy of their books was about $10.