O'Reilly

Raised as a usability problem by 27 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2010–2025), in 17 threads.

People raised many different problems with O'Reilly, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 27 complaints

App is horrendous, hard to believe it's their core business2025-12-09
Commenter finds O'Reilly's user experience horrible to use2025-12-09
Comment says the site's UX is terrible, with no specific problem named2025-12-09
Reading progress is wiped on each login, so the user must find the resource and navigate back to their page2025-12-08
Cancelling the subscription was made very difficult for the user2025-12-08
Text to speech can only start from the beginning, not from a chosen point2025-12-08
The app doesn't work on tablets or phones, so the user can't use it2025-12-08
Code snippets render badly, especially in page view mode2025-12-08
The app is unusable, with no specific problem described2025-12-08
Apps get in the way of reading; hard to tell if rendering problems are conversion or bugs2025-10-16
Support couldn't escalate concerns and kept asking to close the ticket2025-09-21
Page-flip animations refresh the e-ink screen repeatedly, making each page turn painfully slow2023-11-26
Confusing book structure; runtime and browser sandbox halves didn't explain file access limits2022-09-08
The web viewer is so poor the commenter gave up using it2022-08-23
Native mobile reading apps are hard to read with, worse than other e-book apps2022-04-06
Book code examples are nearly unusable, forcing readers to troubleshoot them2017-07-02
Tech books in ePUB and MOBI are badly formatted, so the reader defaults to PDF2017-06-29
App cache breaks repeatedly and clearing it on Android requires digging through many settings menus2017-06-29
Reopened page shows tiny unreadable font until user scrolls; dark theme border stays white2017-06-29
Link shows a "share it" page instead of the PDF, so the ebook is hard to get2015-02-26
Jumping ahead in the video desyncs the video from the audio2013-03-14
Highlight/note popup appears every time text is selected, which is irritating2012-11-27
Website is so slow the user cannot complete a purchase2012-11-26
Must enter full billing address to get a free book2011-12-14
Makes it very hard to cancel a subscription2011-08-10
Buying non-DRM PDFs and getting them onto the iPad takes many awkward steps2011-02-22
Checkout loops back to card entry without error, and unclear whether card was charged2010-09-16