In our continuing quest to meet readers’ needs, SAPIEN Press is looking at a variety of eBook programs (as previously announced, we’re currently working with Books24x7.com already). We know that some publishers include PDFs of some books on the CDs that accompany those books. We’re looking at that as an option for future titles that come with a CD, as well. However, that does nothing for folks who don’t want (or can’t) buy the physical book in the first place (international readers are a good example, since postage can often run more than the book itself). And, we don’t include CDs with every book, because it adds a lot of expense – we’d rather just make code samples downloadable, for example (which we already do). So tell us – by leaving a comment to this post – where you go to buy your eBooks, when you choose to buy in that format. This will help us find some of the better programs out there, evaluate them, and see if we can work with them in the future. Thanks!
Oh, and by the by – we’ve spoken with Safari and eBooks.com and both have declined to accept our titles because we’re still considered a small publisher. So if those are your favorite outlets – sorry, but we apparantly can’t help you there :(.
When will the "big guys" realize that size is almost irrelevant these days with the global reach of the Internet and the fact that Sapien is the IDE of choice for discerning scripters? That aside, I guess I would buy an eBook from Amazon since Safari and eBooks.com are not options.
I would like to have e-Book option to download (Being Non-US), one of the factors which made me download the Powershell book by Bruce,
BTW I liked you sample chapter a lot,till date I refer them.Amazon could be best option.
Amazon.com’s eBook company is MobiPocket. We’re looking into it right now.
We’ve been a bit set back by discovering one of our books pirates (apparantly scanned, a we haven’t made an e-copy available to anyone) on a foreign download Web site. This is personally difficult for our authors who rely on book sales for a portion of their income (and food on the table), so we need to make sure that whatever option we go with helps to protect their copyright. We’re looking hard at MobiPocket.
Unfortunately, MobiPocket uses a realtively primitive variant of HTML for formatting. While that’s probably sufficient for your average novel, in a technical book is leaves a lot to be desired, especially for formatting code readably. Sadly, MobiPocket/Amazon isn’t going to be an option for us.