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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.

I found out yesterday that I received an MVP Award, Visual Developer ASP/ASP.NET.  I’m honored and humbled to join such good company.

I’d like to thank the Dean for the nomination.

ps – I wonder, casually, how diluted the results are going to get for a certain design pattern every quarter with more people announcing their award?

I’m not sure which is worse, too little or too much information.  If
you’re an ASP.NET developer looking towards ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005 then
you’ve found yourself firmly planted in the “too much information” side of the
fence.

Unless you’re locked away in a cube, cutoff from the internet and all other
outside sources, it’s impossible not to see “too much information” growing by
leaps and bounds on a daily basis.  We’ve got the blogsphere that not only
grants publication rights to thousands of people discussing ASP.NET 2.0/SQL
Server 2005 (not to mention those sick individuals that are discussing longhorn
and WPF and linq and other tech) it gives us podcasts, screencasts and
webcasts.  Microsoft has done an amazing job with articles and webcasts on
MSDN.  Not to mention usergroup
meetings, local events, online communities, newsgroups, magazines and books (and
I’m probably missing a few).

So in an effort to chip away at one specific resource type on one specific,
albeit huge, subject I am dedicating the month of May to ASP.NET 2.0
webcasts.  My goal is to churn through one a day, every day, and give a
quick synopsis of the webcast (good/bad, current/out of date, target audience,
did it live up to it, what’s actually covered, what you shouldn’t miss,
etc). 

By my count, and without extensive searching, I’ve been able to turn up over
100 webcasts for ASP.NET 2.0 alone.  I’ll be choosing the webcasts based
primarily on presenter, then description.  I know that’s less
than complete, and there are some duplicating webcasts, but it’s a
start.  If this turns out to be useful to anyone then maybe June will be
SQL Server 2005 webcasts.

Okay, you’ve convinced your boss (or maybe your wife) that you really do
need that second or third 1905FP
because they’re only $300 and you’ll make up for that in increased productivity
in mere minutes after installing it.  Now you’re staring at twice the
desktop, have a bunch of windows all over the place and now you’ve got to deal
with two problems:

1. Finding the window you’re looking for and do something with it
2. Moving some window to the other screen.

While some graphics cards will provide varying degrees of support for dealing
with multiple monitor desktops I think there is a lot left to be desired from
Windows in the form of a consistent windowing utility for multiple monitor
desktops (caveat: I’ve not played with any of the Vista bits yet).

So how do I solve those problems?  Both can be solved excellently by UltraMon, a piece of software
that sits in your tray, gives you access to display settings (cute things like
different wallpaper for each display, etc) but it’s claim to fame is the “Smart
Taskbar”.  It extends the Windows Taskbar across all of your monitors (if
you so choose) and each bar shows only those applications that display on its
screen.  To solve problem two UltraMon will add a few buttons to the title
bar of your windows to let you move them left or right (to the other monitor in
their given state; maximized or not) in addition to full desktop maximize and
restore.

I’ve changed setups enough and often don’t load back on UltraMon right
away.  It’s a nice piece of software but a bit steep at $40.  So I’ve
been on the hunt for a cheaper alternative and found MultiMon Task bar. 
It’s not as pretty as UltraMon and only does its own version of a smarter
taskbar and adds buttons to windows so you can move them from display to
display.  The price?  Free.  I’ve only been using it a couple
days but so far it does exactly what I want and I’m not missing anything from
UltraMon.

A third option I’ve played with, just to solve problem one, is to use an Expose like application
such as TopDesk.  I
installed the trial and played around a bit.  It just didn’t occur to me to
use it enough and the hotspot to explode the windows was very inconveniently
placed (it’s configurable in the full version).  Borrowing from that idea,
I’m guessing, was the firefox extension Reveal, now I do use this all
the time.  I’ve got twenty tabs open, I’ll hit F2 and start typing to
filter down my tabs, hit enter and I’m where I want to be, very, very
slick.

I ran across this image from pablotron who saw it on Engadget for an ebay auction. 
I’ve long been a fan of multi monitor workstations, and have stood by
my personal recommendation of 2n+1 monitors, where n > 0.  I’ve
yet to stick 3 19″ lcd’s at 1600×1200 together but it almost feels
unworthy after you see this: