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Half-price Ebooks for Day Against DRM

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41–50 of 64 posts

Re: Half-price Ebooks for Day Against DRM

#42

Am I dense? When does this "day" start? Browsing with Safari 10.1.1 I see a standard website with standard pricing. I would think that if this were something being promoted there would be a very prominent statement. But I don't see anything? I tried adding a few books to my cart, but they also seem to have regular pricing. The only thing that says "half-price" is the HN title???

No im getting this also...might have ended not sure tbh.

Re: Half-price Ebooks for Day Against DRM

#45

Am I dense? When does this "day" start? Browsing with Safari 10.1.1 I see a standard website with standard pricing. I would think that if this were something being promoted there would be a very prominent statement. But I don't see anything? I tried adding a few books to my cart, but they also seem to have regular pricing. The only thing that says "half-price" is the HN title???

Apparently you needed a coupon code, which was given elsewhere, and the promotion ended a few minutes ago.

Re: Half-price Ebooks for Day Against DRM

#46
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can read them online for free https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/ But the bible must be a better format :-)

Also, they're AMAZING And if you like them, you may like https://www.xorpd.net/pages/xchg_rax/snip_00.html , a book of x64 poems (full disclosure: I was a reviewer)

I know some assembly, but I'm having a hard time appreciating the poems. Can you give me some tips on what to notice or consider about them?

Re: Half-price Ebooks for Day Against DRM

#47
post #18
post #7

The biggest issue I have with publisher websites is the lack of a strong review ecosystem. I've started looking at Amazon or industry blogs for reviews and recommendations, but that gets frustrating and is slow. Just wonder if the publisher could arrange to get rights to it's books' reviews across seller sites and aggregate the results. The truth is, apart from occasional sales like this, the publisher sites are rare…

For technical books, I can't replicate the experience of writing notes in the margins (with a pencil of course) of a paper book versus anything ebook readers offer. Yes, I can't grep or query a paper book but the learning process seems more fluid as the book becomes my own reference source.

Do you think an iPad Pro would work for you? I just bought one and the ability to mark-up PDFs has turned out to work great. It does a good job of recognizing my handwriting and so when I search for some term, it also finds matches in my handwriting.

There are a bunch of different apps for this and none of them are expensive.

Re: Half-price Ebooks for Day Against DRM

#48
post #43
post #13

It's sad that O'Reilly books are no longer available without DRM or subscription.

You can still buy O'Reilly books without DRM through Google.

As discussed previously, the Google ones are like converted EPUB's, they don't match the original/real formatting of an O'Reilly DRM-free PDF.

Re: Half-price Ebooks for Day Against DRM

#49
post #4

Are any of these good? A lot of them look interesting

I just finished Hardware Hacker by Andrew “bunnie” Huang, and I'd highly recommend it. Completely changed my perspective on hardware production, and China's role in relation to it. And for fun he delves a bit into biohacking and how it's related to computers. I think the HN crowd would be into it.

https://www.nostarch.com/hardwarehacker

Re: Half-price Ebooks for Day Against DRM

#50
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A post listing some of these things (things that doesn't work on the kindle, not tomb stones) would be very interesting

For instance, if a book has an embedded jpeg, you can tap it and enlarge it to fill the screen. But if it is SVG art (as we often use for line art like charts and maps), it will not scale. Why not? I don't know. There is no support for MathML, or for scripting of any kind. Support for embedded video is poor. Page lists are suppressed in favor of Amazon's own proprietary system. Note that epub readers like Calibre and…

> These behaviors may be inconsistent across devices.

The image handling inconsistencies are very annoying. Here is what I've seen with several books.

1. When read on an eInk Kindle, images are small. (I can tap them to bring up the option to zoom, and zooming does work, but it is kind of ugly). For example, I've seen chess books where the diagrams are about twice postage stamp size, whereas in the physical book they are about 3 or 4 times as big in each dimension.

2. When read on the Kindle desktop application on Mac, the images are bigger. As far as I can tell when I've been able to compare to the physical book, they are the correct size.

3. When read on the Kindle desktop application for Windows, the images are small like they are on Kindle eInk readers.

4. When read in the Kindle cloud reader, they are the right size like on the Mac desktop application.

5. When read on iPhone with the iOS Kindle app, the images are small.

The main places I've noticed these are with chess books, where the position diagrams are the victims, and math books, where diagrams are the victims, and often also equations if the equations are done as images.

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