Half-price Ebooks for Day Against DRM
nostarch.com
nostarch.com
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 rarely in price competition with any other sellers.
But as far as Amazon goes, I'll buy the books in paper (or pay more for DRM-free) to avoid the Kindle DRM and being locked into one ecosystem. It almost feels like a luxury to be able to loan out or give away paper books. Kindle books just feel more like renting a book than owning it. Which is, legally, probably a closer metaphor for the transaction.
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.
Adobe Digital Editions supposedly supports most of the epub standard, but is a buggy mess, esp. the Windows version.
The image handling inconsistencies are very annoying. Here is what I've seen with several books.
1. When read on an eInk Kindle, images are small. (I can tap them to bring up the option to zoom, and zooming does work, but it is kind of ugly). For example, I've seen chess books where the diagrams are about twice postage stamp size, whereas in the physical book they are about 3 or 4 times as big in each dimension.
2. When read on the Kindle desktop application on Mac, the images are bigger. As far as I can tell when I've been able to compare to the physical book, they are the correct size.
3. When read on the Kindle desktop application for Windows, the images are small like they are on Kindle eInk readers.
4. When read in the Kindle cloud reader, they are the right size like on the Mac desktop application.
5. When read on iPhone with the iOS Kindle app, the images are small.
The main places I've noticed these are with chess books, where the position diagrams are the victims, and math books, where diagrams are the victims, and often also equations if the equations are done as images.
There's also a 4th type which is the used paper copy, where publishers kind of by definition don't compete.
Regardless, that's my admittedly naive rationale for why Amazon or other retailers shouldn't mind sharing review data with the publisher for use on its site.
It would be a no brainer to check a box and get DRM-free vs DRM for the same price. I'd probably pay some premium once I get something (Calibre?) to manage other formats as well as I can manage kindle today, especially since stripping DRM from the latest Amazon format is more challenging than before. But as someone who reads 100+ books/year, it would be hard to justify paying 2x the price for the subset of books I only read once.
OK, well, it's not true if you discount the biggest and cheapest competitor out of hand.
https://kindle.amazon.com/your_highlights
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.
I use Kindle Highlights very heavily while doing research, I then export them for use while writing. That extension will save me a bunch of time.
There are a bunch of different apps for this and none of them are expensive.
Cheap paperbacks wear out quick, I wish hardcover was available after books come on paperback because the books I like in paperback I go back to look for hardcover but by then hardcover is out of print. Though often I can find a library edition which is starting to become my default for paper books.
I always saw it as a way to turn pirates into paying customers, and the would-be pirates still felt like they were getting a good deal. It's a win-win.
Some of their books in specific topic areas are actually good, but in general, beware.
(For fiction or single-read, I would still probably go with Amazon. For a tech book which I'd want to keep reading and potentially view on platforms which don't have Kindle and where defeating the DRM could be a challenge, publisher direct.)
Browsing with Safari 10.1.1 I see a standard website with standard pricing. I would think that if this were something being promoted there would be a very prominent statement. But I don't see anything?
I tried adding a few books to my cart, but they also seem to have regular pricing.
The only thing that says "half-price" is the HN title???
The No Starch folks have assembled a really interesting catalog of books.
But the bible must be a better format :-)
And if you like them, you may like https://www.xorpd.net/pages/xchg_rax/snip_00.html, a book of x64 poems (full disclosure: I was a reviewer)
Some are very self explanatory, like 0x00, which I consider a sort of tutorial on how to read the book. Others require careful thought and a few glances at the instruction set manual to figure out. Some, like 0x04, are so hard to figure out that either you ran into the solution once in your career and you know it, or you didn't. Try asking colleagues if it rings a bell. My personal favorite is 0x13, because how rewarding it was to figure out what's going on.