Well, I signed up and I'm very dissapointed.
You're limited to 10 books within a 30 day period. You're given tokens to download entire chapters from books in .pdf format (not all books have all chapters available.
Its got the whole book... not quite page by page, but section by section. Some chapters have 3 sections, others have 50.
If you can read a book on the screen (or had unlimited books on your shelf to browse through) this would work fairly well. Unfortunately, I can't sit still reading a book on a screen that long. I need to print them out.
Copy 'n Pasting a whole book takes a while. You're allowed to keep electronic or hardcopy backups so long as you maintain your suscription. So you could legally print out every book they own, so long as you kept paying 20 (or more) US dollars a month.
Actually having said all of that, I might have picked up a suscription.
The deal breaker is that they have a HUGE selection in comparison to most of the larger book stores you might wander into and fully blow the smaller book stores out of the water - yet they're so limited.
To tell the truth, I came off of O'Reilly's site looking for one book. The Components in .Net book. Safari doesn't carry that book.
Their vb.Net books are limited to about 35. More than my personal modest collection, but nowere near the number that are out there. This is 35 including duplicates. Sometimes you'll see a first and second edition next to each other on a search list.
Really, they have books covering so many areas, but what I was looking for in .Net was hardly covered and in Flash, was zero. Not a single Flash 2004 book.
Maybe they have a future, but right now its no deal with me.
I'd reccomend it if you're continiously trying new technologies. They have books on flash, perl, java, php, javascript, xml, C#, C++, C, Delphi, etc. It sure beats laying out $50 bucks on a book that may just sit on your shelf.