To whom it may concern;

We write to you as a collection of concerned O’Reilly authors, long-term platform participants, and users. 

Thoughtworks has published with O’Reilly and together, shaped the thinking of the industry for many, many years. 

Many of us have been subscribers for many years through the ACM program. 

O’Reilly have made a business decision to terminate this relationship and are offering AACM subscribers a transition path. https://learning.acm.org/e-learning/oreilly

The link above states that O’Reilly will not allow the existing subscription to be transferred. This means that the many years of curation in playlists and highlights that thousands of users have made would be lost in the transition. Many of these users have clients who depend on their up-to-date knowledge and the loss of this knowledge, by forcing such users to start again with a new O’Reilly account seems ill-considered. 

Given the number of ACM users who, in many cases, are at the centre of the computer industry, I would imagine that retaining these members and satisfying their needs would be something that you are concerned with.

Under such conditions each transitioning user would have to have to let their library go.  The additional amount of time each user wouldn’t have to spend to recreate it is both unwarranted and impractical.

Given the very large number of books and training courses that speak to the importance of user centricity and listening to the user, it is very surprising that the O’Reilly platform would choose to completely ignore the guidance it offers its subscribers. In fact, it’s ridiculous that you would allow this to happen at all. 

We would be very grateful if you could please review and address the ACM transition with a view to address user needs. 

While we understand that O’Reilly has determined that it does not wish to continue to distribute its platform through the ACM channel, we believe there is a more sensible way to achieve O’Reilly’s business goals, one that works with its users as partners. At Thoughtworks, this is what we always do with our clients, and we hope you will do the same.