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Half-price Ebooks for Day Against DRM

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Re: Half-price Ebooks for Day Against DRM

#23

Post by carlosgg »

treehau5 wrote: post #4

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

Also, Al Sweigart makes available many of his books for free on his website, including "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python", which also has a lot of good reviews on Amazon.

http://inventwithpython.com/index.html

Re: Half-price Ebooks for Day Against DRM

#24

Post by jp_sc »

Finnucane wrote: post #17
dudul wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The truth is, apart from occasional sales like this, the publisher sites are rarely in price competition with any other sellers." Is this really true? I usually by ebook/pbook combo and I find that I get a better deal directly on the publisher's website. Amazon is a non starter for me because I don't buy into their ebook format. "ebook" to me means epub and pdf.

I am involved with ebook production for an academic publisher. I sometimes joke that I am going to have "that doesn't work on the Kindle" engraved on my tombstone.

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

Re: Half-price Ebooks for Day Against DRM

#26

Post by kajo »

Tepix wrote: post #13

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

O'Reilly had the serious flaw that you could just claim you own a book by adding its IBAN to your account's library and thus being able to "upgrade" it and obtain the ebook version for $5. I wonder why that worked as long as it did.

Re: Half-price Ebooks for Day Against DRM

#27

Post by soapdog »

_e wrote: post #18
ballenf wrote: 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.

You might not like it but many ebook readers have annotation support. Usually you can highlight text and add notes. In the case of Kindle, you can later find all your highlights and notes on:

  https://kindle.amazon.com/your_highlights
There are browser add-ons that make this page better and easier to export. One example is http://www.norbauer.com/bookcision/ which will allow you to download your notes in XML, JSON or plain text.

Personally, I don't use the online notes page. I am more than happy with the device showing me my own notes. There are also options for showing popular notes and highlights.

I agree that it is not frictionless like pen and paper, which I also love, but for those like me that live in far away countries where up to date books are expensive and hard to find, being able to use ebooks from abroad and use the notes features is a blessing.

Re: Half-price Ebooks for Day Against DRM

#29

Post by donquichotte »

Rant time! Some time ago, I bought a Tolino, an e-reader by Deutsche Telekom that is sold in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands. Huge mistake! At first, I loved not having to lug around printed books. Then the screen broke, I got the device replaced. Then the updates started. It looks like the device is running Android. Instead of a sweet half hour of light reading in the evening it was a sweaty two hours of searching my two passwords (one for the device and the Thalia bookstore, and one for the Adobe DRM, which I need to enter everytime I want to read in a book I fu*king paid for, and don't get me started on the keyboard and the slow screen refresh rate) before the unskippable update finished. The update broke my account, so I had to physically go to a bookstore to have them restore my account, which is the exact opposite of what I had in mind when purchasing this piece of utter garbage. Then I started realizing that books on Amazon are like 50% cheaper than in the Tolino store, and there is no way to buy books on Amazon and read them on Tolino. Oh, and they don't have a lot of books either, especially if they're not in German! What a horrible experience, I will never again buy anything made by Tolino, Thalia or Deutsche Telekom.
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