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.
