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Can anyone make any recommendations?
Their server seems to be swamped. There's nothing like a unresponsive server to sober you up from a whimsical book purchase on a FRiday. I was trying to buy: * Making Things Talk (great into to networking with low-level HW) * The Best of Instructables (excellent selection of mostly simple projects, includes IKEA hacking)
I guess 70% savings is always enough to get everyone to take down their server.
Extracting an epub from an iPhone app is easy. First you unzip the .ipa file. Then you cd to Payload/*/book. Finally, you zip up the files to an .epub file: zip -X ~/book.epub mimetype && zip -r9DX ~/book.epub META-INF OEBPS.
mimetype must be first in the archive for validity, which you can test with EpubCheck.
I can't think of anything O'Reilly offers that I want to read right now aside from maybe Agile Web Development with Rails.
You can get $5 O'Reilly EPUBs from the App Store everyday. Extracting an epub from an iPhone app is easy. First you unzip the .ipa file. Then you cd to Payload/*/book. Finally, you zip up the files to an .epub file: zip -X ~/book.epub mimetype && zip -r9DX ~/book.epub META-INF OEBPS. mimetype must be first in the archive for validity, which you can test with EpubCheck.
They are in multi-file HTML format inside the APK, so this is even cheaper and given I wanted them on the Android phone/tablet anyway, easier.
Even better the eBook app O'Reilly delivers has an "Export to ePub" button that will send it to an ePub on your sdcard.
If I had an iPad I might consider it to see if I can read on that, but I've found that I only ever read books when printed on the pulped, mangled, processed bodies of brutally murdered trees.
Especially for technical books where I end up flipping around pages back and forth something that the computer probably will never be able to model intuitively. Though I must say I like my kindle enough that it is readable for normal books. But there is just something about paper :)
If I had an iPad I might consider it to see if I can read on that, but I've found that I only ever read books when printed on the pulped, mangled, processed bodies of brutally murdered trees.
1. For those books that support the HTML view, I've read them in the browser from the Safari Library web site. These have been excellent, including diagrams and code snippets. One or two books have had slight formatting problems (a line of example code not wrapping).
2. For books that don't support the HTML view, or books that I've downloaded as PDFs (part of the my subscription is a certain number of "download tokens" that can be redeemed to download chapters or whole books), I've read then in GoodReader. This has worked out fine.
3. Finally, they offer some books for download in EPub format. I've tried those in iBooks, and they've been good. I've also used the free program Calibre to convert some of the PDFs I downloaded to EPub and they have worked fine.
I am quite pleased with the combination of O'Reilly Safari Library and my iPad.
Oh, they've also announced that this summer there will be a Safari Library iPad application. That should be interesting.