Loving the half-price ebooks of new releases
I'd buy a lot more book if every publisher conducted business the way of Manning (are you listening O'Reilly?). You get to buy their latest releases before they're even available at Amazons for 50% off the sticker price and it's fully refundable if you later opt for the paper version.
I bought Jack Herrington's Code Generation in Action (great book on one of my favorite topics!) this way and I've been overwhelmingly impressed by the process. First of all, it was Real Easy. A few clicks and a credit card number and you're off to the download. Instant knowledge-desire fulfillment. On contrats, I usually order 5+ books at a time when I do it from Amazon, so that only happens a few times a year.
Manning doesn't even lock up the PDF (+1 for trust), so I printed chapters two and three for a long bus trip, and read the rest off the screen. The latter is of course a much smoother experience with the new Preview in Panther, which includes 1000% speed-up, text-searching, and copy/pasting, so that happened from the iBook that's running the WWDC Panther beta.
Worrying less, reading more
But neither the convenience nor the trust exhibited was the real kicker. The change in reading habits is what's going to make me do this more. At half the price of a regular book (or actually closer to one third of the price when you include all the shipping and VAT fees you won't be paying), you can try out more titles and you don't have that nagging feeling of responsibility to read every single page.
So I read the first five chapters, skimmed the rest, and dived in for specific examples on the problems I was facing while trying it implement the ideas. With less internal pressure to read the book cover-to-cover, it was much easier to get started. Hence, I actually read more than I would have otherwise, and as a result "finished" the book over just a few days.
This means I can jump from reading one book a month to reading two or three. While still only paying only for the one. How great is that?
Getting O'Reilly, Amazon or even Apple on board?
Now if only we could get the mammoth of technical books to jump off the subscription wagon (I like to own, not rent, my books) and onto the eBook train, I'd be a happy bookworm!
Of course, I'd be even happier if Amazon entered this market and made me forget all about individual publishers again in favor of focussing on the titles I wanted. Or maybe we could get Apple to sidestep the establishment once again and add ebooks to their digital media operations?
