I cancelled my O'Reilly subscription because it's cheaper for me to buy the books from the publisher. I go through one book every few months. I thought I'd go through more with unlimited access but I didn't. $539.88 a year vs maybe $140-$200 I spend on books (I take advantage of discount codes when they come up).

I also like to go back to books. I cannot do that with the O'Reilly platform when a subscription ends.

I hear you and agree on the unlicensed training point - it is a form piracy.

>which have indexed all of the books and used pirated copies to do so

Funnily enough, people on HN often do not consider this an issue, like at all... I wonder how they'd think about it if they had created something (meaningful) that was subjected to this. I love Go and learned it a lot in the past 2 years but ultimately put it down in favor of more "batteries included" solutions as I don't trust myself enough as a dev to confidently handle concurrency in Go. Still, it's a beautiful language and if I ever come back I hope I can still find books about it, as I hate using AI for learning.

It's also relative to the employment numbers.

Companies are shrinking body counts, so you have less buyers of programming books.

2 of May 2026 is me! Learning Go is such a great book.

Thank you for your excellent book.

Your book is highly recommended in the Go community.

I will definitely be reading it once I finish "The Go programming language".

This has nothing to do with the article posted or anything, I was just curious... who gets to pick the animal on the book cover? Do you (the author) get to pick, or does the publisher (O'Reilly) pick?

I bought 3 programming books last month including this one. I really enjoy “Learning Go” over the official go book.

This is not a jab at you (or your book), But I always assumed O'Reilly's per book sales would be significantly larger, like 4 figures at the minimum

Just want to say this is quite informative and helpful, thank you for the transparency.

Your book was my path to Go. Thank you! Having a physical book means much to me.

Yours is a good book (got both editions myself), but sadly language learning books will be hit the hardest by AI. Partly it’s what you said regarding copyright washing, but the other big reason is that people will code less; I am writing little to no golang and am prompting it instead. The book is still useful to me, since I want to continue to understand what’s happening, review code, etc, however I expect that my kind of software engineer will be in the minority in the future.

If you publish a 3rd edition and I’m not replaced by AI by then, I’ll buy it. :)

On other topics, using AI can fill some gaps, but books summarizing years of hard-won knowledge are priceless. NoStarch is amazing when it comes to such resources. They have an upcoming book on Linux kernel Memory Management for example, the classic Linux tome from Kerrisk and very specialized security books.

On the other hand I cancelled my O’Reilly sub because I didn’t read enough to make it worth the price and now I purchase DRM-free e-books individually, as needed.

Might also be because of Anna’s Archives

How do you feel about these LLMs potential piracy of your book?

I appreciate your response, it's great seeing real data and getting to form opinions on it this way.

hi Jon!