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I’ve tweaked how my twitter bot @apressdailydeal tweets. One of the biggest sources of confusion was caused by my linking directly to the ebook details page on Apress’ site. Today’s book, for example, is Storage Networks but the details page doesn’t show the $10 daily deal price. It’s shown in the card and on the Daily Deal itself.

The old format went something like this:

[Date] Title (link to details page for book)

So yesterday’s deal was:

[2009-06-24]: Excel 2007 PivotTables Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (http://rubyurl.com/HtMV)

The new format:

Title, Publish date, Author, (DailyDeal link)

So today’s deal is:

Storage Networks Pub. Jun 2004 by Daniel J. Worden (http://su.pr/2R677z)

Twitter takes care of the date, I add author and publish date so you can decide if it’s worth buying a book from 2004 (sometimes they are, other times not) and I avoid confusion by linking you back to the page that says $10.

Disclaimer: I’m not associated with Apress in any way. I was just annoyed/surprised that they didn’t have an RSS feed or something for a “daily deal”. I wouldn’t remember to come back every day. Yes, Apress has some affiliate type program but you can’t earn anything off the daily deal. I think the only thing this has really done, for me, is cause me to spend more money because I’m actually seeing the deals every day. (Though if they wanted to send me a Kindle DX to read all these books on, I wouldn’t send it back )

It seems I can’t stop thinking about ebooks, so David Allen would say I need to capture it in a trusted system so it’s not stealing all my attention. My system and I are still working on trust issues, so I’ll put it here, with reasonable expectation that I can come back to it if need be. Hopefully that won’t be the case and someone else will point me at the solution.

I’ve been listening to “The Long Tail” from Audible (it’s still the original version, not the Longer version). Based on that book, what I would love to see for my ebook need, is the Rhapsody of ebook’s.

All you can read/take/etc for a monthly subscription. Maybe something like O’Reilly’s Safari but everything is completely portable. There’s a finite shelf span for most technical books, some can barely keep up with the fast paced development of the languages, systems and frameworks they cover. Obviously there are more general technical books that hardly go out of style and those would either be in my permanent rotation or I’d buy individual copies of those somewhere else.

Combine the Rhapsody all you can eat model with beta books/first looks/rough cuts to get the freshest content to the most eager eyes seems like a win-win situation. But I don’t write books, or publish them, or host a millions of mp3 files either.

A little over a month ago I posted about The ebook reader dream. Well part of that dream has become reality. Dave Thomas and the folks at Pragmatic Programmers have been busy releasing all their books in digital formats, so they actually look good from day one on Kindle and Sony Readers (through epub and mobi formats). And it doesn’t cost you any more, buy an ebook and get access to PDF, .mobi and .epub. There are a few books that aren’t being offered in .mobi and .epub, notably Dave’s Pickaxe, for technical reasons (the tweet escapes me now).

Now if only some of the other publishers would take notes. I don’t know what’s involved, I’m not a publisher, but if the Prags can get it to work and do eBook reader formats why can’t, at least, the other tech focused publishers?

A quick search shows that O’Reilly is offering digital formats for a book at one price as well including .pdf, .mobi and .epub as en Ebook Bundle. I didn’t know this and I’m not sure how good they look on the various devices, but at least they understand.

Apress, I’m looking at you. They have a 24 hour DailyDeal that offers an ebook (PDF) for $10. Seems ripe for the opportunity to publish epub and mobi formatted versions. But they don’t even have an RSS feed for the DailyDeal. So a while back I hacked together a twitterbot, @apressdailydeal, that tweets about the new book.

If you’re writing a book, why don’t you demand it be available as .mobi and .epub?

I’m calling out the “tech publishers”. If you know someone that is associated with any of these companies please let them know we still like dead tree books but love being able to carry around our library on our Kindle/Sony Reader/iPhone/etc and we don’t want to pay for each digital version, let me pay one price and give me all the digital formats I want.

I can haz ebooks?
Packt Publishing
Apress
Addison Wesley (Pearson)

A quick Amazon search on ruby books in “Computers & Internet” turns up 2,696 results. [aside: who knew there were that many ruby books]. As the image below shows, 5 are Kindle/PDF formatted. Obviously O’Reilly and Prags are and some of their results show up on the first page, so potentially they’re not listing all their formats through Amazon, but still a very sad state of affairs.

This certainly impacts my buying preferences. I’ll typically buy book bundles to get a printed and digital copy, if you’re not offering me the option, I’ll look elsewhere. I can still convert PDF but wouldn’t you (the author, the publisher, the device manufacturer) want the book to look the best it possibly could, no matter where it was being viewed? I through device manufacturer in, maybe as a “can’t we all just get along” jab, but it seems they’d want to make this as dead simple as possible for everyone to pimp their product.

Here’s my ebook reader dream: Have searchable PDF content in a highly portable format that doesn’t make me want to stab myself in the eye when I read it. Is that really too much to ask?

Over the past year or so I’ve increasingly bought PDFs for technical books. Almost every book I’ve bought from Pragmatic Programmers in the last year I’ve bought the PDF and paper bundle. This gives me access to the beta book and it’s been really convenient to fire up the PDF and search for something specific.

I’ve also started buying quite a few PDFs from Apress through their daily deal (or, more specifically, following my twitterbot @apressdailydeal) for $10. I’ve bought a few books that I wouldn’t have otherwise bought because $10 is a no brainer for me.

So far, PDFs have been great for searches on specific words. They’ve been horrible for actually reading. Reading on an LCD at your desk sucks. It’s not much better on a Tablet PC. My current tablet is an X60T and weighs in at maybe 5lbs, and it’s still not something I like to have with me on the couch while I spend “quality time” with the wife as she watches “Survivor”. I can’t imagine a laptop is much nicer as the keyboard is just in the way most of the time. I have a buddy that reads on his iPhone, I can’t get over the idea of reading a paragraph at a time on display the size of a deck of cards.

So what about ebook readers? I’ve seen very few out in the wild. I believe I’ve seen one Kindle and a Sony PRS-505 at borders. If they were really awesome, you’d think I’d see more, especially in the technolust circles I travel.

Kindle support for PDF is experimental at best, you have to email the PDF and they’ll [Amazon] will convert it and make it available to you. Sounds like a great plan for a bunch of text that you’d like to have on your Kindle and a horrible on for a technical book. Something like The RSpec Book with loads of code sections or Web Design for Developers with code and lots of illustrations just doesn’t stand a chance? Maybe with a little more control over the process I’d feel more comfortable about it, but I have no confidence an automatic converter would get close.

I read a lot more technical books than any other type of books so PDF support needs to be pretty good. Granted, I’ve not looked at how many technical books offer Kindle support for a reasonable price. Reasonable to me isn’t much beyond the cost for the paper book, let me spend another $5 or $10 and have a digital copy. So without real PDF support on the Kindle (and with Amazon dropping SD on the Kindle 2) it didn’t seem like much of an option. Even if there was a lot of available content for the Kindle I don’t want to throw away my existing ebook library.

It seems the next obvious player was the Sony PRS-505. That’s right, the older model, not the newer 700 because it doesn’t have back lighting on the screen which is supposed to degrade the viewing experience of the display. I’ve even seen one guy talk about how he reads a Pragmatic Programmer’s book on it. It’s Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, so not a ton of code in this one.

Border’s is clearing them out and had them on sale, and in stock, for $270. I decided to take one for the team and see if I can get my technical PDFs to display decently on an ebook reader. Over the next few weeks I’ll be going through my library, mostly as I have a need for them, and trying to convert them to a usable format on the PRS-505. I’ll show side by side comparisons of the print book, the publishers original PDF and the PRS-505 natively and with conversion.

In the mean time, I have a question for the publishers: Is it loads of extra work to offer a variety of digital formats? I’d even concede a few rough edges if it were generally formatted to fit the screen layout of a particular device. The PDF gives me searchable content, but I’d like it to be more portable than the paper version.

NoVa CodeCamp 2008.02 is in the books and was a success.  We fought freezing temperatures, dodged runners on the way to the venue and even left amidst a flurry.  Thanks to everyone that came out, all our speakers, volunteers, contributors and organizers.

There’s still one more thing left to do: submit evaluations.  We know there are a couple things we could have improved on (publicity for one) but we’d like to get your opinion on it.  We’re offering three lucky evaluators an O’Reilly book of their choosing.  Winners will be selected next Wednesday, December 17, 2008.

To fill out your eval, go to codecampevals.com and select the NoVa CodeCamp 2008.02 link.

Safari

I mentioned in the keynote that you could use your Montgomery County Public Library card to access O’Reilly’s online book catalog Safari.  David mentioned that Loudoun County library users had the similar benefits. If anyone knows about Fairfax or Prince William respond in comments and I’ll update the post.  Seems there is a way for public libraries to have up to date technical books after all.

APRESS has been discounting a single eBook to $10 for a 24 period for a couple months now, that I know of.  They’re calling it the eBook Deal of the Day:

At 12:01 AM PST, a different Apress or friends of ED eBook will be priced at $10 US for a 24-hour period. Check back everyday for a new deal. If you have any further questions, please contact support@apress.com.

Awesome, $10 for an ebook is a good deal, even if I can’t read one cover to cover digitally I can still search through it as a reference.  I end up just printing ebooks, which probably defeats the purpose, but oh well.  Maybe when the Kindle or another reader is up to the job for technical books it’ll be a different story.

Anyway, I like to keep my eye out for a deal so I’ll just subscribe to the RSS feed and check my reader for ebook goodness.  Except there is no RSS feed.  Come on, APRESS, this just screams for a feed.  I dropped an email to everyone I could think of, my UserGroup liaison, her boss because she was on vacation and had a responder, support and suggestion links on the website, everyone.  Still no RSS feed.

So what’s a geek to do?  Try one of the several “create a feed for non-RSS enabled sites” services and get the information that way.  I tried a couple but either I or they were obtuse and impatient and I couldn’t get what I wanted.  In retrospect, I could have used that time with a bit of Hpricot and probably had exactly what I need.  I might do that later, look for another post on that.

I then turned my attention to the always reliable Firefox extension community and found Update Scanner.

After you install the extension, press ALT+U or select “Update Scanner” from the tools menu:

That will open up a sidebar with pages you’re interested in scanning for updates.  Click on the far left button to start scanning a new page:

It’s smart enough to fill in some defaults for the active tab in Firefox.  If that’s not what you want just make the changes.  Title could be cleaned up a bit: “Apress eBook deal of the day” maybe?

I put the threshold fairly low for changes as they only change about a paragraph of text every day. I’m also only scanning their site every day, let’s try to be courteous users and not hammer their site.

Now all you have to do is wait until tomorrow for something that looks like this and you’ll know that there’s a new deal (or that something has been updated if you’re using this for other pages).  Update Scanner can also open all updated pages in new tabs, handy if you’re diffing the net during morning coffee or something.

So why the post?  Most of the deals I’ve seen so far have been for older material, this doesn’t mean they’re not good, some texts are classic and their content might always be relevant, but books about version 1 of the .NET framework probably aren’t.  Today’s was actually published mere months ago on SQL Server 2008 XML (hopefully not the single row, single column XML blob that I’ve actually heard people talk about as a good idea! ).  In the future if I’ll pass along other “good deals” in my opinion.

I have no affiliation with APRESS, just think of this as a PSA.