eHattip
A moment’s hearty hurrah for the fine, forward-thinking folks of O’Reilly Media
While catching up on a chum’s splendid bloggish-thang, I noticed that the new book by Rands is now available. On the Amazon page, the dead-tree hardcopy was still on pre-order, but the Kindle version was available straight away.
Normally, at this point, I would have hit that tempting, orange, A/B-tested-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life “Buy Now with 1-Click®” button and been on my merry way. But then I noticed that the book was published by O’Reilly.
O’Reilly (and can I just interject here to show off that I’m old-skool-geek enough that I still hit their website by typing ora.com into my browser, because that’s what their domain was when I bought my first animal-woodcut-covered book, dammit. Also: Get off my lawn!) have a smart attitude to eBooks purchased from their own website. You can download your eBooks in various DRM-free formats: PDF is almost always available, but often so too are ePub and mobi, and occasionally something called “Android”. (I believe that’s some sort of Chinese iPhone knockoff)
Because of this, by purchasing eBooks directly from O’Reilly, I can carry them around and read them in a variety of fashions. If it’s a mainly wordy book, then the soothing-to-the-eyes e-ink screen of my Kindle is just dandy. The reflowable ePub format works a treat in iBooks on my always-in-my-pocket iPhone and increasingly-always-in-my-bag iPad. And with Apple’s recent iBooks update, I can quickly switch to and from the designed-and-laid-out-by-a-professional view of the PDF which perfectly mimics the physical original.
So thank you O’Reilly and Associates Media for your top-notch splendiferousness. I hope more publishers start taking this approach too.