O'Reilly to support multi-format e-books, goes ePub

[Daithi]

I read a lot of computer books and the first thing that occurred to me when reading this article was "how are they going to accomodate all the special formatting found in most technical books?" The answer is on O'Reilly's website.

Quoting from O'Reilly's website, "Why just a few dozen? Besides wanting to limit this to an experimental pilot before committing resources to some not-insignificant ecommerce updates, much of our catalog relies heavily on computer code and complex tables -- two types of content that are not rendered well on most of today's ebook readers. Sure, there are some ugly hacks to make code blocks look a little better on a Kindle, but we're holding out for true monospace font support. Ditto for support of many of the special characters used in books like Unicode Explained and Fonts and Encodings. Even Adobe's Digital Editions chokes on a lot of the non-standard characters we use in many of our books (yes, it's possible to embed fonts, but many more characters should be supported out of the box). Our hope is that in the coming months, ebook readers will improve enough to make more of our titles truly usable for ebook customers."

Does this sound as if O'Reilly is pressuring Amazon to upgrade their ebook format? The mobi format simply won't support the vast majority of O'Reilly's books.

[rmeister0]

Originally Posted by Nergal

Now they should get rid of that Safari stuff. I'm curious if there will be something I am going to buy.

They absolutely should NOT get rid of Safari. It is a very useful service for processional programmers. For less than $500 a year I access to a searchable library of titles publishes by O'Reilly and a bunch of others. It is a modest professional expense for the value people like me get from it.

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by Daithi

The mobi format simply won't support the vast majority of O'Reilly's books.

The Kindle does not have a monospaced font, so I read this as a Kindle issue rather than a MOBI issue. Anyone know if MOBI can display code snippets in a monospaced font (e.g. in the Windows Reader)?

[manchuia]

Originally Posted by rmeister0

They absolutely should NOT get rid of Safari. It is a very useful service for processional programmers. For less than $500 a year I access to a searchable library of titles publishes by O'Reilly and a bunch of others. It is a modest professional expense for the value people like me get from it.

I agree 10000%

I just recently went from a Linux shop to a windows shop. The needing to purchase all the books I needed to quickly bring myself up to speed would have been prohibitive. Safari made it easy and I can still reference at the new job as well as home.

If anything, I think Amazon should work out the browser to work with Safari better to support the oreily books that don't make it into the store

[Daithi]

It is not just monospaced fonts. A lot of technical books use tables and other types of formatting to design their pages. A monospaced font won't always be enough to support formatting issues. Even with a monospaced font the Kindle still has a limited display width, and I have no idea how they plan on displaying text formatted into columns where the source text is wider than the Kindle can handle. This scenario will happen quite frequently with technical books.

[lee1234]

How is the price compare to printed books?

[Nergal]

They absolutely should NOT get rid of Safari.

rmeister0, I must admit I never got to use Safari beyond the free testing time from a paperback-voucher, because I found it pretty expensive for a non-professional and it was not as I had expected it to be.

Nonetheless I wish they would now lay a ebook-voucher in the back of the paper-editions, so you could have both worlds.

It's funny, my IT-Books are the only I sometimes really like to read with real paper in my hand.

[Alisa]

I'm fortunate that I have an employer that pays for Safari, but if I didn't I would still have free access to a limited number of their books through my local public library. It's a pretty decent selection. I don't know if it's particularly common to offer this or if it's just because I live in an area where there are a lot of tech workers.

[Alexander Turcic]

NYT's David Pogue (who has an intrinsic fear of piracy) encourages O'Reilly to adopt some antipiracy steps:

I'm encouraging O'Reilly to adopt some antipiracy steps, like adding a footer at the bottom of each page that says, "This edition specially prepared for bgates@microsoft.com" (or whatever your e-mail address is). That might deter people from posting their copies online for all to download.

This is not, of course, quite what Kevin Kelly is proposing; I'm not offering the book for free. But at least I'm defusing the argument that says, "The only reason people are pirating your books is that you're not offering e-versions for legitimate sale."

[zelda_pinwheel]

wow. for a tech guy, Pogue really doesn't seem open to change at all. i almost get the feeling he doesn't actually *trust* it (just sort of a vague impression...).

i notice that his suggestion about the anti-piracy steps comes in the context of "accepting" a bet to put one of his books "on teh darkweb" to see whether it has any impact whatsoever on sales (and if yes, positive or negative), except that instead of putting it on "the darkweb" he'll be magnanimously allowing people to pay for it in e-version ()... but still reeeeeeally not comfortable with the idea that completely unprotected copies are going to be out of his sight.

i personally will be interested to see what (if any) effect this has on his overall sales, although i would have been even more interested to see what (if any) effect it would have had on his sales to actually *do* what the bet proposed (ie, release a book "on teh darkweb").

find out, in the next episode of the ongoing saga, "Pogue vs. teh Pirates" !!

[spooky69]

I hate him so much; he pretends to be independent, but he is clearly a Republican.

[tirsales]

As far as I understood, O'Reilly wanted to implement Watermarking?

And really - whats the big impact of having your version of an e-book stamped if (by using that stemp) you get rid of DRM?

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by tirsales

As far as I understood, O'Reilly wanted to implement Watermarking?

And really - whats the big impact of having your version of an e-book stamped if (by using that stemp) you get rid of DRM?

i see nothing wrong with that ; it won't affect my (consumer's) use of the book in any appropriate context, nor interfere with my reading it. however it's one more element of the original bet that Pogue would be altering, whereas it would have been an interesting experiment to try the bet as it was proposed.

[manchuia]

Originally Posted by Alisa

I'm fortunate that I have an employer that pays for Safari, but if I didn't I would still have free access to a limited number of their books through my local public library. It's a pretty decent selection. I don't know if it's particularly common to offer this or if it's just because I live in an area where there are a lot of tech workers.

I think it's more due to you being in Silicon Valley I have only seen that type of "deal" offered through University Library Systems for students.

I pay for Safari out of my own pocket (full library subscription) as it has allowed me to move on new tech in different jobs (freelancer for a bit there) quicker than trying to go to the book store, look up books, buy, and then transport them with me.

With Safari, my tech library is an N800 tethered to a mobile (or Wifi). It pays for itself easily if you find you are switching roles frequently.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Alexander Turcic

NYT's David Pogue (who has an intrinsic fear of piracy) encourages O'Reilly to adopt some antipiracy steps:

I'm having a background conversation with him in email, and have suggested he pay a visit here.

Part of his problem is "Once bitten, twice shy." He provided PDF copies of a couple of his books to folks who claimed to be visually impaired and would use screen readers to deal with them, and then discovered the books uploaded to a Russian crack site. He felt violated.

My question was "What sales did you actually lose, and how do you know?" My feeling is that he not only doesn't know, he can't know. How do you measure sales lost because people downloaded a free copy from a crack site rather than buying a legitimate copy? I told him if he can come up with a validated way of making such a measurement, he has a whole new source of income from interested content providers.

I also asked whether he had ever actually read an ebook, given his illustration of why a technical book might be nice for a computer person who wanted the book in a window on screen as they worked on the stuff the book covered, but didn't see people being interested in reading the stuff the Baen Free Library offered on screen, and thinking it might well make them buy a paper copy.

I saw two deeper questions underlying his post. The first was "Why ebooks at all?", and what would make them an attractive purchase. The second was "Why DRM?", which is a facet of an even deeper question: "What do you assume about the market?" Do you assume they are basically honest folks who are willing to pay for value, and actually buy electronic editions, or do you assume they are a bunch of no-good so-and-sos who will cheerfully rip you off given a chance, and will require measures to prevent it? Why do you make the assumption you do? What hard evidence do you have to back it up?

My personal feeling is that piracy certainly exists, but enough of the market are honest and willing to pay for value that you can sell ebooks and make money despite piracy. I also feel that DRM is ultimately counter-productive. DRM is no sooner implemented than someone comes up with a crack. You may delay a pirate, but you won't stop them. You probably will annoy buyers who are offended by the presumption that they are thieves.
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Dennis