I’m on the hunt for a decent Google Go book. I usually prefer a Manning text, but their Go book is a little incomplete at the moment.
I settled on The Way To Go, and saw that Kindle edition was a steal at ~$3, so I snagged it. This was a mistake.
In fact, my every Kindle purchase of a technical book has been a mistake. It’s not just wonky fonts or off colors. They’re a god damned repaginated mess. They’re usually downright unreadable.
And code examples. Christ. The person who wrote them can’t tell what the fuck they do.
They look as if you gave a troubled child a pair of scissors and a complex book and said “Hey kid, somehow make this fit a smaller screen.”
I get it. There are challenges with fitting a wide range of devices.
You know what seemed to handle that OK, though? PDFs. Remember those? What the fuck was wrong with PDFs? Paginated to the original specifications of the publisher. Full color. Beautiful fonts. Legible.
This problem was solved in 1993.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers won a Grammy for “Give it Away” in 1993. They could have gone back to their dressing room and enjoyed a beautiful Ruby book on their shared Hewlett Packard desktop. Why the fuck are we worse off going into 2013?
I purchase a Kindle book every few months to sort of check in. I says to myself, “Self, they’ll get this worked out eventually. There are very big companies involved. Other people have this problem.”
But I’m starting to wonder if technical books were just forgotten in the transition.
I mean, who gives a shit about some nerds when you’re moving bazillions of copies of books that help teens or moms explore new facets of their sexuality?
I’m assuming it’s more accurate to blame the publishers. Maybe it’s just not worth the effort to put in the extra design work. If they put out a shitty version for the kindle, they’ll still make sales because of the popularity of the platform. There are probably even people with crappy-enough taste not to care.
Don’t tolerate it. It’s unacceptable.
Next time you’re about to grab an ebook, compare the Kindle sample to the PDF sample from the publisher. You’ll spend a big chunk of your career reading about your craft. Why suffer through another hollow digital representation?
Use PDF and enjoy the luxurious amenities the early 90′s had to offer.
You’re worse off because that’s how vendors want it. They want to lock you into their devices and they want to prevent interoperability. Technical manuals are an edge case for the device; the device was created to read normal books with simple, paragraphed text.
Hi, Tim.
Your post reminded me of section “The eBooks” in John Siracusa’s own post a while ago. His own commentary is subdued compared to yours, but I have never seen any other topic drive him to sarcasm, ever. That’s a serious achievement on Amazon’s part.
http://hypercritical.co/post/27978338524/about-my-mountain-lion-review
Now that you mention it, I do remember now how annoyed he was at the problems.
PDF has basically five problems.
One, it’s too powerful. The Kindle is a piece of crap; you can load PDFs on it, and you should. Reflow is so slow it’s visible. PDF wants better than a Kindle (or a Fire or etc.)
Two, its first ten years it was a paid product, so people still think of it as one.
Three, it’s just sort of spectacularly bad at re-flow, which is a serious issue on eReaders, where people are used to size-changing fonts. “Paginated to the original specifications of the publisher” is actually a problem, not a benefit; it locks you into layout choices which are very smart on paper and very stupid on a screen.
Four, authoring for PDF is a gigantic pain in the ass, unless you happen to use some niche toolchain like I do (in my case, PrinceXML.)
Five, I’m not convinced we actually are worse off today than we were then. I had several books as PDFs back in 1993 and I found them painful; I also had Meyers on CD as HTML, and whereas it was uglier, it was also a hell of a lot more usable.
“I mean, who gives a shit about some nerds when you’re moving bazillions of copies of books that help teens or moms explore new facets of their sexuality?”
Amazon does. They fought to make PDF work for ten years. It’s a fool’s errand.
“Next time you’re about to grab an ebook, compare the Kindle sample to the PDF sample from the publisher. You’ll spend a big chunk of your career reading about your craft. Why suffer through another hollow digital representation?”
Try actually reading the same entire book in each, then a second book in the other order.
Yes, it’s prettier; it’s also a hell of a lot less usable.
“Use PDF and enjoy the luxurious amenities the early 90′s had to offer.”
What amenities would those be? Oh, did you think the reason Amazon’s free scans of paper books were garbage was something to do with their hosted format?
It’s actually because Amazon wants to make titles available on Kindle worse than it wants to keep quality high on kindle. They’ve been robo-scanning books. There are no humans involved in the process.
Notice how all the problem books are from 2006 or earlier.
That’s because modern books are handled well up front.
You have jumped to a false conclusion about the problem, you have failed to actually test the hypothesis, and now you’re confused why someone who spent a decade on PDF, supports PDF today, and prefers PDF submissions isn’t just using PDF.
Maybe this is a cue to research harder before declaring someone else wrong.
It’s a little silly to say it’s “spectacularly bad at re-flow”. It’s a page-oriented format.
Like, you know, books are.
This is beautiful. Nice fonts too!
I agree and sympathize completely. For technical books I don’t even consider the eBook unless a PDF is available.
.
Unfortunately, some publishers think that an EPUB is superior to PDF, so they create an EPUB master and then convert it to PDF, confusing the buyer. This happened to me when I bought an eBook on InformIT.com. Luckily they gave me a refund after I complained that the PDF is not an original copy of the book
Tim,
Interesting post. I work in publishing; generally we offer customers PDF, epub, and MOBI when they buy ebooks from our sites.: http://www.informit.com/store/ebook-formats/
We measure which formats are downloaded most frequently–PDF wins hands down, but with epub growing at a healthy rate. MOBI is way behind. In surveys, customers say they most often like to read technical books as PDFs on their iPads.
Caleb, I work at the company that runs InformIT.com. I want to apologize for your bad experience. I’d also like to connect with you to learn more about the problems you had so we can make it better for everyone else in the future.
Hi John,
I read technical books as PDFs on my iPad as well, and I shop at InformIT.com because I like the content (Addison-Wesley publish a lot of high quality technical books), and that you are now selling books DRM-free.
Since choice is good for consumers, it’s good that you offer both a PDF and EPUB versions (they are, after all, the two most popular formats). But these formats are not alike, and when you offer an ebook in both formats, it would make sense to warn the consumer when the PDF is a mere conversion from the EPUB master file.
Amazon have been doing this for a while with some of their Kindle textbooks, they call it “Print Replica copy”: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200738250 And if I were to shop @ Amazon, those are the only kind of technical books I would buy.
As a recent example, I wanted to buy the newly re-released “C Programming Language, 2nd Edition” by Kernighan and Ritchie, but I had a hunch that the PDF version would be a mere EPUB conversion, so I decided not to.
I hope that you guys are going to re-release more eBooks of computer science classics (fingers crossed for Donald Knuth’s, TAOCP, Concrete Mathematics and others), and when you do, I hope that they all have digital print replicas.
Thanks!
Hi Caleb,
I work with John Wait and thought I’d jump into the conversation…
Almost all the PDFs we offer through InformIT are made from the same layout files that we use to produce the print version of the book. It’s only for some of our older titles that we occasionally run into an obstacle and have to find another way to produce the PDF. So for recent releases you should always find that the PDF has the same layout as the print version. Sometimes we do also include additional features (links, video, etc.).
Caleb,
The PDF of K&R “C Programming Language, Second Edition,” is a digitized version of the print book. Just wanted to let you know it is safe to buy!
Thanks,
Dayna Isley
Digital Development Editor
Addison-Wesley Professional
Prentice Hall Professional
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Have you actually every *tried* reading a PDF on an eReader? It’s almost undoable. Many are designed for color and lack decent contrast. The fonts might look nice, but are hard to read on e-ink; esp. when it’s not black-on white or when the font is too small. And lots of fonts are too small since many PDF’s are letter or A4 sized and your e-reader is likely to be much, much smaller than that.
So for most documents you’ll need to manually zoom in to individual bits of text, and you’d better hope that the line length fits comfortably on a screen, otherwise you’re basically screwed.
The solution to the problem of reflowing a document for a tiny screen is definitely not PDF. The fact that some publishers manage to do just as poorly using what is essentially just html+css lies entirely with them, since it’s not actually that hard to get right.
I see what you’re saying., but I’m not looking for better reflowing. I’m wanting to give up on it. I’ve never seen it done correctly for a technical book.
Why are you reading technical books on a platform that was not designed for them? Technical books require larger screens, and the ability to quickly flip back and forth. eInk eReaders are a poor choice for that — they were meant for reading novels.
Have you used Inkling? It’s neither PDF or ePub. Some of the code samples in the book are even interactive.
Checking it out now
The eReader screens are too small for my tired old eyes to read detailed information, like technical books. I tend to read technical material on the MBP and recreational material on the Kindle. Let’s get realistic, the Kindle (and all other eReaders) were designed to replace paperbacks – something you’d take to the beach or park to read.
Tried reading a programming book on the Kindle and decided that I got better mileage out of having the book page up on one screen and working on the code on another screen. That’s why we have multi-monitor set ups.
I agree. It’s clear the actual reader is targeting paperbacks. In fact, I love my Kindle for that.
I’m just shocked that the vast majority of these texts are useless. Particularly on an iPad, where a PDF looks beautiful, Kindle technical books are just flushing money down the toilet.
I tried to address these problems with iTeX. See the website and the free iPad app for details.
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