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Comment by JLO64 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I would’ve liked to fork over cash for a book like this but the deal breaker for me is that it’s in PDF format. I like to read all of my books on a Kindle (with koreader installed) so epub files that can be resized to fit its weird dimensions are a must.

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Noted. I will try to provide alternative formats. Not sure how it will go with the code examples, but I shall try.

Edit: One reason why I picked PDF is that I expect the readers to actually follow the examples in their own terminal while going through the book. So in that sense I was thinking about reading it on the desktop.

That's a big ask. I've written a couple of books, and PDF/print vs. ePub/webpage is a decision I had to make up front. For anything with more than the most basic formatting (e.g. a novel), the design and layout are different enough that one of them will turn out looking like crap. Given the audience, I probably would have chosen ePub for this one, but the book's done now.

Also, a TOC and sample chapter would be great. A lot more people will be likely to pay if they know what they're getting.

Honestly I haven't tried yet. Maybe Asciidoctor (Which I used) has it figured out. It would at least need to have good enough output for the code examples, otherwise it would probably be a non-starter.

I added links to example pages (which include TOC) to the Gumroad page and here, but yeah I should have put it on the homepage.

For what it’s worth I would have purchased if this was available in physical form (I’m weighing purchasing anyway, but my personal hunch is I’d pay $20-30 for physical copy and probably $10-20 for pdf).

Amazon makes it quite easy to publish books that get printed on demand, and they accept pdf files as inputs.

Thanks for the input. I have made several updates to the book in the past and this would be lost in print, but as the book matures and I incorporate feedback it can be interesting to try offering a print version. Perhaps print-on-demand type of thing.

Amazon does print on demand. I have a book published there that I sell at cost and it’s about $8 shipped. Print quality is pretty good.

If you make changes, you just upload a new template and you’re all set.

Thanks for the tip. I will explore it.

Yeah, same. On a phone or smaller e-reader, regular PDFs designed for normal book size are often unreadable.

You can use calibre and convert it, most of the time the result is very good.

Have you tried pdf reflow with koreader? I find it works pretty well

Honestly I would’ve liked to fork over cash for a book like this but the deal breaker for me is that it’s in PDF format. I like to read all of my books on a Kindle

When I made my purchase, the options were Download and Send to Kindle. It's not ePub, but it's something.

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