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Cancelled my Safari subscription

I cancelled my Safari subscription today. I love the concept, but I found I simply wasn’t using it enough to justify the cost. I also found my typical usage to be a bit strange — what I loved about the service is that it enabled me to do searches over reference materials that I typically already have in print and on my physical bookshelf. For example, I might be writing some code and think, “man, I know I saw an example of this in one of my books.” Well, instead of digging through it, I could use Safari to quickly do a keyword search. Eventually, the realities of this set in: I’m paying $20 a month to have online access to books I already own. That’s just silly. What I need is a different service. I want to purchase at a very low cost, or download for free, PDF versions of books that I buy in print. That way I can have a searchable copy on my laptop, but I don’t incur an ongoing fee to use it. It could work the other way around too, where upon purchasing a physical book online, I’m allowed to download a PDF version right away. (This sounds a lot like the Beta Books concept, which I think is wonderful.)

If anyone has pointers to such a service, I’d love to hear about it.