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.
This is definitely a hacky way to go. I just tried it with Matz’s Ruby book. Reading it with Stanza on OSX is just about the ugliest digital reading experience outside of scanned text.
It's an issue of using a subpar client, not a subpar format. I have yet to find a decent epub reader for a computer. Stanza for iPhone, iBooks, and dedicated hardware render epubs beautifully.
Appears to be a common trend, same situation here for iPhone 3D I just got and was excited to 'download immediately' but I get 'no data' or no books to download.
I called up their customer service and they mentioned that it's not showing up because the servers are under heavy load. The lady on the other end of their customer service line was really nice and I have no doubt the ebook will show up in ours accounts eventually.
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.
From what I've seen, O'Reilly material works well on iPad. I have a subscription to Safari Library, and have tried using it three ways on my iPad.
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.
Why would an iPad help? It still has the eyeball-melting backlight, and it has a glossy screen, so you have to read through a reflection.
There's a reason why people like e-ink-based ebook readers so much. They may not have games, but they are really good for reading ebooks. (Though I admit that the normal Kindle is not so great for books that have diagrams.)
I have a Kindle DX. Love it for reading research PDFs from start to finish.
I had also figured it would be fantastic to shrink the shelf space for tech books, and always have those books at hand. Big downside that doesn't hit you till you try to use it for this purpose: the e-ink can't page flip fast enough to be useful.
Readers on the iPad (iBooks, even Kindle app) don't have this issue.
I'm not sure I follow. But what I have learned from reading HN is that I am probably the only person in the world that reads each page of a book in order. I start with the first page. When I'm done reading that page, I read the second page. Induct on n.
I prefer e-readers (Sony Reader, Kindle DX, iPad) because I read at the speed of about one airport novel per hour, meaning I need five books for a cross country flight. It's easier to carry these electronically, and I keep a backlog of 50 - 70 books available to read.
For computer books, such as the jQuery Cookbook I purchased yesterday from O'Reilly in this sale, I will also read each one from cover to cover. With that reading I form a visual spatial memory of where in the book I can find any information I need.
My memory is not eidetic. I can't read the actual words, and I don't remember every page number. But I do know about how deep in the book, left or right page, and where on the page to look, so I can usually find a needed reference within a half dozen page turns.
With e-readers, this is fuzzier. The "where in the book" depends on the progress bar, and there's no left or right to halve the search, so takes at least 10 - 20 page turns instead. These page turns are SLOOOOOW.
On the iPad, page turns are many times faster. So, finding reference material in a thick reference book that I cognitively mapped on the iPad is commensurately faster.
I have read more than 3000 screens (pages?) on my iPad so far and my eyeballs have not melted yet. I think it is quite a personal thing whether you like using an iPad for reading a lot of material or not.
I find it a lot easier on my eyes than my Macbook Air, for reading, not sure why. But there it is.
I find it a lot easier on my eyes than my Macbook Air, for reading, not sure why. But there it is.
Could it be because you spent $500 on it for the purpose of reading books, and your mind won't let you think negative thoughts about the experience?
I had a pair of pants like this. They were the wrong size, uncomfortable, and ugly. But I wore them anyway because it was too late to return them, and I spent $75 on them that I could never get back. So I just learned to like them, even though they were fundamentally flawed.
No. I am certain that isn't it. As I did get it for free. I don't really think the iPad is the Jesus tablet, but I certainly would spend $500 on another one if I lost this one, to read books on it.
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.
Yes, if only such technology existed where you could swap between two bookmarks with a keypress. Or where you could jump to a particular page by just typing in a number.
FYI: Looks like ordering multiple books created issues getting delivery of yesterday's purchases. I also lost the discount after checkout. Today's order pricing isn't what was reflected at checkout.
Today the two titles I bought in two orders are listed as "registered" under the registered books area.
Order status on both orders reflects "BOOKED", but shipped is 0, download link is not active, and the books are not listed in the downloads section.
One purchase shows the discount, the other reflects full price without discount.
An email to O'Reilly auto-responded with this:
> Thank you for contacting O'Reilly Media Customer Service. We are experiencing a very heavy volume of orders due to our recent promotion. This is affecting the delivery and access of your electronic media. Please be patient and keep checking your account.
TL;DR: Buyers should double-check orders to see what was actually charged.
There were issues with our servers on Friday due to high loads, and we've been working to make sure everyone received the content they purchased.
We have refunded you the amount that you would have saved if the discount code was applied to one of your orders. Please allow 5-7 business days for the credit to appear on your statement.
Thank you again for your orders and for your understanding. Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance.
I think there are some valuable lessons to be learned by this sale for O'Reilly, tech publishers and authors.
* 9.99 standard pricing will result in incredibly high sales volumes (the servers would not nearly have been overloaded if everyone wasn't clamoring to get their purchases in before the deadline)
* Publishers and authors need to decide whether they want larger margins w/low volumes - I am of the understanding that selling 5k copies is considered a best seller in the tech market - instead of lower margins with higher volumes. I'm hoping that the results of yesterday's sale might make them consider the first point above.
It would be interesting to see if O'Reilly released some statistics on book sales in the wake of yesterday's server bloodbath.
Myself, I bought a pile of books that I otherwise would not have bought. I have an O'Reilly Safari subscription that is already saving me tons of money, and the low price just pushed me over the edge to buy some local copies of books that I might have otherwise just had in my bookshelf for a month.
- Javascript: The Good Parts (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748/)
- High Performance Javascript (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596802806/)
It's always a good time to buy a few classics:
- Information Architecture for the WWW (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596527341/)
- Javascript: The definitive guide (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596101992/)
- Beautiful Code (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510046/)
My book 'Programming Windows Azure' just came out today. :) I feel bad about plugging it here but hey, I put heart & soul into it for the last one year so I feel justified :).
If it helps, I need to point out that my book is chock-full of Star Trek, BSG and Monty Python references and the surprising backstory of how Windows Azure's orginal code name came to be. :)
Thanks for writing such a great book. One of the treasures in my (ever growing) collection and I am even citing it in one of my papers I currently write :)
I grabbed Hadoop: The Definitive Guide
Tomcat: The definitive Guide 2nd ed (this one I have access to via ACM membership but those rotate out potentially so eh)
Head first Statistics (my math skills are beyond rusty, and the head first books tend to be good.
However either due to overload or something, while I was able to place my order, the books are not showing up in my available list yet. Figure I'll give them until tomorrow then throw an email at them asking what's wrong.
97 Things Every Programmer Should Know (ed. Kevlin Henney) is sort of nice reading. All pretty smart ideas so far, imho. Though I haven't finished reading it.
This caught my eye...
And then I remembered that my safaribooksonline subscription lets me read all the o'reilly books I want, and thousands of other tech books, for $20.00 a month.
For anyone who wants to use this coupon, I'm not sure why you wouldn't just get yourself a month on safari... or a free trial for that matter....
Any ideas?
Strangely this promotion led me to pick up the "MEAP" edition of Clojure in Action from Manning Publications. I already had The Joy of Clojure and I wanted to see the other side.
I can't think of anything O'Reilly offers that I want to read right now aside from maybe Agile Web Development with Rails.
Seems like this is a popular promotion, based on their website performance. I wonder if it will make anyone reconsider the recent controversy over Amazon's pricing for Kindle editions. Seems like lots of people are willing to buy e-books for $9.99.
Yeah at $9.99 it's worth picking up things for a look. At $30-$40 you want to be sure you'll have the time to read it and it's something useful/ interesting.
These are technical books that retail for $30-$60; so $9 is a great price.
Amazon is charging $12-$13 for some novels that sell in hardback for $15, and $6.99 for some novels that are $7.99 in paperback. That's not such a great deal.
Out of curiosity anyone able to download their books yet? The loading data screen no longer hangs for 20+ seconds, but it still doesn't find the books.
I'm not. Lots of companies use C#, Visual Studio, or just Windows in general, and the best books for those topics usually come from MS Press. It would have been nice to get the C# 2010 book through this deal.
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.