E-books for work?
May 31, 2011 1:22 PM Subscribe
What e-book vendor offers the widest selection of technical titles with reasonable DRM that I can suggest to my employer?
I would like to recommend that we start buying e-books at work (instead of only paper books), starting with the IT department. Currently, our Procurement staff buy paper books most often from Amazon. What vendor (Amazon? O'Reilly's Safari? something else?) offer a good selection of tech books without suffocating DRM?
We do a lot of Oracle and Windows and Solaris and .Net and are getting into Linux. We don't intend to cheat the system and buy a single copy to share: I'm actually trying to find a vendor where someone in Procurement can order the book for me without it having to be associated with my particular device. Has anyone's employer done this for them? (We're .edu IT, if that helps.)
I suspect that Kindle would be good because the reader app exists for so many platforms. Is this true?
PDFs and epubs and such would be better than online-only solutions like Safari, but I am interested in all feedback. Thanks in advance.
I would like to recommend that we start buying e-books at work (instead of only paper books), starting with the IT department. Currently, our Procurement staff buy paper books most often from Amazon. What vendor (Amazon? O'Reilly's Safari? something else?) offer a good selection of tech books without suffocating DRM?
We do a lot of Oracle and Windows and Solaris and .Net and are getting into Linux. We don't intend to cheat the system and buy a single copy to share: I'm actually trying to find a vendor where someone in Procurement can order the book for me without it having to be associated with my particular device. Has anyone's employer done this for them? (We're .edu IT, if that helps.)
I suspect that Kindle would be good because the reader app exists for so many platforms. Is this true?
PDFs and epubs and such would be better than online-only solutions like Safari, but I am interested in all feedback. Thanks in advance.
Along with O'Reilly, I shop at The Pragmatic Bookshelf and Manning Publications.
posted by bleary at 5:17 PM on May 31, 2011
posted by bleary at 5:17 PM on May 31, 2011
Response by poster: bleary, should that link be to http://pragprog.com/? I will check them out -- thanks!
posted by wenestvedt at 5:38 PM on May 31, 2011
posted by wenestvedt at 5:38 PM on May 31, 2011
Yes, oops. markup mistake, I guess.
Btw, O'Reilly, Pragmatic Bookshelf, and Manning all have DRM free books. You can usually get your book in pdf, mobi (kindle friendly), and other formats. You aren't tied to any device.
posted by bleary at 5:43 PM on May 31, 2011
Btw, O'Reilly, Pragmatic Bookshelf, and Manning all have DRM free books. You can usually get your book in pdf, mobi (kindle friendly), and other formats. You aren't tied to any device.
posted by bleary at 5:43 PM on May 31, 2011
Best answer: One more thing to add -- I bought a kindle dx a while back because I wanted to be able to read technical books on it, and the non-pdf technical books sometimes have crappy formatting. Try to get your department to provide a way for people to get ebooks without being tied to any one store. Being stuck with amazon would suck with respect to technical ebooks.
posted by bleary at 5:48 PM on May 31, 2011 [1 favorite]
posted by bleary at 5:48 PM on May 31, 2011 [1 favorite]
One thing about using a kindle or similar device - a lot of people don't like them for technical reading specifically, because they kind of suck when you want to be flipping back and forth between different parts of a book. They're really still best for sequential reading.
posted by egg drop at 12:25 AM on June 1, 2011
posted by egg drop at 12:25 AM on June 1, 2011
Packt Publishing have been extremely helpful on a couple of occasions.
posted by humph at 5:47 AM on June 1, 2011
posted by humph at 5:47 AM on June 1, 2011
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posted by rmd1023 at 2:04 PM on May 31, 2011 [1 favorite]