Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Humble Book Bundle: Unix

humblebundle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 132 posts

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#21

Post by Jtsummers »

marklawrutgers wrote: post #17

Does anyone know the legality of putting the DRM free pdf files into a public Dropbox folder? Not sure what copyrights or licenses still apply if I decide to buy these and share this with other people.

http://support.oreilly.com/oreilly/topics/if_i_buy_pdf_versi...

This is O'Reilly's take on it. You can lend it, but you can't have access to it while it's lent out. Really, really hard to enforce. But I believe PDFs are watermarked (don't know how they'll do it with this bundle), so if you lend it out and the copy gets into the wild, so to speak, they can trace it back to your account.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#22

Post by Yhippa »

bathory wrote: post #3

My biggest gripe with this bundle is that they are all digital. I'd rather have less books but then in a printed format. I have noticed that I can't concentrate on reading books when they are presented to me on my computer screen. I do have a kindle (1st or 2nd generation) and that device doesn't support PDF well, furthermore it is rather slow. It works fine for regular books though, where I don't have to flip throug…

I'm the kind of guy who used to print out articles from the web to read and now I can't concentrate while reading a physical book. I think the constant visual reminder of how much I have left to read bothers me for some reason.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#23

Post by Jtsummers »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #19
rhizome wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to be glib, but this is a pretty Sheldon-esque line of reasoning.

No it's not. "Pay what you want" is the most prominent statement on the whole page. The one dollar minimum for content is obscure. edit: why do people vote me down when what I say is true? I'm sorry but I'm not willing to pay for tutorials on open source applications that I can otherwise legally get for free. Humble Bundle isn't even a non-profit corporation. They are a private for-profit corporation where profit is…

The $1 minimum is above the particular tier. Along with the marking for the $8 and $15 tiers.

And when you enter in the amount you want to pay, they tell you exactly what you will (or will not) get.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#24

Post by khedoros1 »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #19
rhizome wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to be glib, but this is a pretty Sheldon-esque line of reasoning.

No it's not. "Pay what you want" is the most prominent statement on the whole page. The one dollar minimum for content is obscure. edit: why do people vote me down when what I say is true? I'm sorry but I'm not willing to pay for tutorials on open source applications that I can otherwise legally get for free. Humble Bundle isn't even a non-profit corporation. They are a private for-profit corporation where profit is…

Even less prominent is the "free" tier. You'll get one book for it.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#25

Post by GavinMcG »

marklawrutgers wrote: post #17

Does anyone know the legality of putting the DRM free pdf files into a public Dropbox folder? Not sure what copyrights or licenses still apply if I decide to buy these and share this with other people.

I am not a lawyer, and I don't intend this to be legal advice. That said, having done a somewhat more than cursory amount of study when it comes to intellectual property issues, I'm 100% confident that this would be unlawful in the United States, and 95% confident that it would be unlawful in whatever country you're residing in right now, if it's not the US.

And frankly, I think a more than cursory study is overkill.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#26

Post by mkesper »

dman wrote: post #15
bathory wrote: post #3

My biggest gripe with this bundle is that they are all digital. I'd rather have less books but then in a printed format. I have noticed that I can't concentrate on reading books when they are presented to me on my computer screen. I do have a kindle (1st or 2nd generation) and that device doesn't support PDF well, furthermore it is rather slow. It works fine for regular books though, where I don't have to flip throug…

I would prefer digital but in a way where I downloaded just one pdf file. Searching across multiple pdfs is pretty broken for me. If people have any tips to share that work on Windows / Linux I would appreciate it.

You could join the Pdf files, but honestly, one file of different books containing several hundred pages each sounds impractical.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#27

Post by Lio »

codewritinfool wrote: post #7
misframer wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They say "name your price of $1 or more."

Yes, they do, but they also say, "Pay what you want"

I guess you can pay nothing but it does seem a little mean considering how cheap the suggested minimum prices are for the bundles and that it's all for charity.

I say thanks O'Reilly, promotions like this are why you're still so great after all these years.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#28

Post by dublinben »

derekp7 wrote: post #20
bathory wrote: post #3

My biggest gripe with this bundle is that they are all digital. I'd rather have less books but then in a printed format. I have noticed that I can't concentrate on reading books when they are presented to me on my computer screen. I do have a kindle (1st or 2nd generation) and that device doesn't support PDF well, furthermore it is rather slow. It works fine for regular books though, where I don't have to flip throug…

My problem with PDF technical books is that they are typically formatted for 8.5x11 or A4 paper, typically with a really huge margin. I wish that there was something in the PDF spec to allow for multiple sizes to be specified in a single file, so that the same file can be used for printing as well as viewing on a 6 inch reader.

It sounds like what you're really asking for is a proper e-book format, like EPUB. PDF is not an e-book format, it's a presentation format, for print-equivalent documents. They aren't interchangeable.

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#29

Post by Aldo_MX »

bathory wrote: post #3

My biggest gripe with this bundle is that they are all digital. I'd rather have less books but then in a printed format. I have noticed that I can't concentrate on reading books when they are presented to me on my computer screen. I do have a kindle (1st or 2nd generation) and that device doesn't support PDF well, furthermore it is rather slow. It works fine for regular books though, where I don't have to flip throug…

I purchase a bunch of technical books in digital format, but I always skip books which are not DRM-free and don't deliver at least PDF and EPUB formats.

It is true that code examples look broken at times, but most of the times turning the kindle to landscape orientation does the trick.

You should avoid feeding PDFs to your Kindle, since they only look good on a PC or on a 4:3 tablet (ex. iPad or Galaxy Tab S2), although, after reading a chapter on your Kindle, it is positive to skim through the PDF to get a grasp of the details you might have missed.

As a Kindle owner, the format you really want is .MOBI (or .EPUB converted with kindlegen[1] and trimmed down with kindlestrip[2]).

Most .MOBIs you'll encounter are actually conversions from .EPUB with kindlegen, so you should trim them down with kindlestrip too.

Finally, if you're a Kindle power user, then you should give Calibre[3] a try to convert other formats to .MOBI, but be warned that the conversion is a hit-or-miss.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000765211

[2] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/kindlestrip/

[3] https://calibre-ebook.com/

Re: Humble Book Bundle: Unix

#30

Post by mkesper »

freehunter wrote: post #5

The $1 tier is great for anyone just starting out with bash or Unix. The $8 is amazing value, that's beginner through intermediate Unix skills, basically as much as most anyone would need. The $15 tier, IMO, is completely optional unless you know that you need those books. And at that point, you probably already have them. Good sale!

I'm asking myself how relevant they are today? Tcp/Ip 3rd is from 2002, as well as Essential Sysadmin 3rd.
Post reply on HN