My O'Reilly Wish List

 Posted on 
 ·  2 minutes reading time

O'Reilly Media -- my favorite technology publisher -- is offering a contest in which they are giving away $500 worth of books from their catalog. To enter, one must post a public wish list to books, e-books, and videos from the O'Reilly catalog and send the URL to O'Reilly using a web form. As long as the total of all the items on your wish list is less that $500, you're entered. The deadline is 11:59pm PST on Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2011, and the sweepstakes is limited to U.S. residents only.

These are the books (all in EPUB ebook format) on topics that I'm interested in or would like as reference works.

  • [openbook booknumber="9780596801991" publisherurl="http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596809799"]
  • [openbook booknumber="978-1-4493-0323-5" publisherurl="http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781449303228"]
  • [openbook booknumber="978-0-596-55881-9" publisherurl="http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596558819"]
  • [openbook booknumber="978-0-596-80163-2" publisherurl="http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596801632"]
  • [openbook booknumber="978-0-596-80276-9" publisherurl="http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596807504"]
  • [openbook booknumber="978-0-596-80454-1" publisherurl="http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596804541"]
  • [openbook booknumber="978-0-596-15800-2" publisherurl="http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781449394875"]
  • [openbook booknumber="978-0-596-52146-2" publisherurl="http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596803438"]
  • [openbook booknumber="9780596557270" publisherurl="http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596557270"]
  • [openbook booknumber="978-0-596-52758-7" publisherurl="http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596558727"]
  • [openbook booknumber="978-0-596-80675-0" publisherurl="http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596806774"]
  • [openbook booknumber="978-0-596-00982-3" publisherurl="http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596159450"]
  • [openbook booknumber="978-1-4493-8834-8" publisherurl="http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781449388355"]
  • [openbook booknumber="978-0-596-80437-4" publisherurl="http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781449388287"]
  • [openbook booknumber="978-1-4493-9368-7" publisherurl="http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781449393694"]
  • [openbook booknumber="978-1-4493-7745-8" publisherurl="http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781449377458"]

The list totals $418.84 for the ebook versions of all of the titles. (I don't think it is cheating to select the less expensive ebook versions; the EPUB versions are perfect for reading on-screen, searching within the books, and copying code snippets.) This post uses the WordPress Open Book Data plugin to pull information from Open Library based on ISBN and link back to the O'Reilly catalog (via the publisher name in the above list; link to the O'Reilly Media catalog entry are a requirement of a contest entry).

I don't think I've mentioned O'Reilly Media on DLTJ before, but they really are my favorite technology publisher. If we were to focus on just their book publishing activities, I like how they offer free errata updates to the ebook editions. Earlier this year they announced how they retroactively went back and improved the formatting of their ebooks. Sure, it was a relatively simple thing to do, but they offer the updated editions to previous purchasers for no extra cost. That really encourages customer loyalty (and another reason why I'd like the ebook editions, should I happen to win the sweepstakes).

Beyond their book publishing, though, they are the force behind Make Magazine (all about making stuff), Ignite events (five minute talks using 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds), O'Reilly Radar (insightful blog posts), and the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC) conference. Many of the artifacts from these activities are posted freely online.

By the way, neat idea for a contest. Doing it this way probably generates a lot of Google Juice to O'Reilly items.