Last month O’Reilly announced that they will be starting an experimental pilot and selling selected titles in an eBook bundle. The bundle includes a PDF, Kindle-compatible Mobipocket and of course an ePub formatted version.
Today, O’Reilly announced the availability of 30 eBook titles! The cost of the bundle is a little lower than the paper version and if you wish to pay a little more you can get the print book with the eBook bundle included!
Here is the full list of those thirty titles;
- Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide
- Subject to Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World
- Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management
- Wikipedia: The Missing Manual
- Facebook: The Missing Manual
- Windows Vista: The Missing Manual
- Designing Web Navigation
- Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 3ed
- The Art of Agile Development
- Process Improvement Essentials
- Enterprise SOA
- Applied Software Project Management
- Practical Development Environments
- Security and Usability
- We the Media
- Devices of the Soul
- Digital Identity
- Database Nation
- Spam Kings
- Open Sources
- Open Sources 2.0
- Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
- Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing
- The Cathedral & the Bazaar
- Mind Performance Hacks
- Statistics Hacks
- Smart Home Hacks
- Wikipedia Reader’s Guide: The Missing Manual
- Flex 3 Cookbook
- Painting the Web
At the moment they will only be providing twelve of these for the Amazon Kindle (highlighted in bold), the rest will be released over the coming weeks. At present the Kindle still has a number of formatting issues so it lacks support for tables and monospaced fonts, which are very important to the O’Reilly books, this means they have to convert all tables to image files.
We all hope that Amazon will fix these issues and more importantly, start supporting the ePub format natively on the Kindle
If you do decide to take the Print+Electronic option you will save yourself well over 50% of the eBook price. For example;
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web
Electronic: $31.99
Print Book: $39.99
Print+Electronic: $51.99
This means your would get the eBook bundle for just $12…that’s a saving of 63%. On top of that you get three different eBook versions, all of which come with free updates…not bad!
If you just buy the print book then you will pay $8 more … the cheapest version they sell is the electronic version ;-)
But I do get your point.
We are still in the early stages of all this e/p choice, but perhaps in several years time we might receive the electronic versions for free when we buy the printed book.
Or you could get the printed book for only $20, a savings of 50%!
I may be a tad sl0w, & all that.
But $32 for a DIGITAL FILE is REALLY excessive!
I mean, most companies use digital files to print the paper versions from, right?
So, its not like they had to change anything, to make it work.
Well, OK. Maybe they changed the format.
Still, have YOU ever changed a file’s format?
Was it difficult?
NOT the ones I’ve changed.
Yeah, ink, on paper. Printing, binding, shipping. Yeah, I get that; its expensive.
But a DIGITAL FILE?
Looks to me like printing is obsolete.
So yeah, keep on overcharging.
I’m sure THAT’s gonna’ keep you in business!