
Half-price Ebooks for Day Against DRM - dabber
https://www.nostarch.com/
======
ballenf
The biggest issue I have with publisher websites is the lack of a strong
review ecosystem. I've started looking at Amazon or industry blogs for reviews
and recommendations, but that gets frustrating and is slow.

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.

~~~
dudul
"The truth is, apart from occasional sales like this, the publisher sites are
rarely in price competition with any other sellers."

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.

~~~
Finnucane
I am involved with ebook production for an academic publisher. I sometimes
joke that I am going to have "that doesn't work on the Kindle" engraved on my
tombstone.

~~~
jp_sc
A post listing some of these things (things that doesn't work on the kindle,
not tomb stones) would be very interesting

~~~
Finnucane
For instance, if a book has an embedded jpeg, you can tap it and enlarge it to
fill the screen. But if it is SVG art (as we often use for line art like
charts and maps), it will not scale. Why not? I don't know. There is no
support for MathML, or for scripting of any kind. Support for embedded video
is poor. Page lists are suppressed in favor of Amazon's own proprietary
system. Note that epub readers like Calibre and Apple iBooks can manage these
things. It is intrusive about formatting: it may decide that your lists need
to be bulleted whether you want them or not. It always underlines links, which
is a pain with note callouts. These behaviors may be inconsistent across
devices.

Adobe Digital Editions supposedly supports most of the epub standard, but is a
buggy mess, esp. the Windows version.

~~~
tzs
> These behaviors may be inconsistent across devices.

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.

~~~
Finnucane
Image sizing is a tricky issue. When ebooks started to become a more
mainstream thing, image size in the file was limited by the vendors, and also
we sometimes had third-party licensing restrictions. Over time, of course,
devices got more memory and higher-resolution screen, so larger file sizes are
allowed, or even desirable. However, consistent behavior is still elusive. And
that's even assuming optimal coding on the part of the publisher or whoever is
doing their conversions; they may be using files that are not adequate for the
higer-res screens.

------
pella
PragProg: 40% off DRMFREE ebooks for #DayAgainstDRM / Valid July 9-12, 2017.

[https://media.pragprog.com/newsletters/2017-07-10.html](https://media.pragprog.com/newsletters/2017-07-10.html)

------
kod
The Linux Programming Interface by Kerrisk is probably the best book of its
kind. Even better than Stevens' Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment,
although obviously linux specific.

[https://www.nostarch.com/tlpi](https://www.nostarch.com/tlpi)

~~~
itamarst
Yes, it's wonderful. But personally I'd recommend getting the paper version.

~~~
kod
I have both. It's worth mentioning that, unlike a lot of technical ebooks from
other publishers, the No Starch ePub version seems to be well-formatted and
totally usable on a e-ink reading device (Kobo Aura One in my case).

------
Tepix
It's sad that O'Reilly books are no longer available without DRM or
subscription.

~~~
kajo
O'Reilly had the serious flaw that you could just claim you own a book by
adding its IBAN to your account's library and thus being able to "upgrade" it
and obtain the ebook version for $5. I wonder why that worked as long as it
did.

~~~
freehunter
Because enough people would still buy them at full price, and if you were
willing to scam your way into a $5 ebook, at least you're paying _something_
for it instead of just pirating it.

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.

------
donquichotte
Rant time! Some time ago, I bought a Tolino, an e-reader by Deutsche Telekom
that is sold in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy and the
Netherlands. Huge mistake! At first, I loved not having to lug around printed
books. Then the screen broke, I got the device replaced. Then the updates
started. It looks like the device is running Android. Instead of a sweet half
hour of light reading in the evening it was a sweaty two hours of searching my
two passwords (one for the device and the Thalia bookstore, and one for the
Adobe DRM, which I need to enter everytime I want to read in a book I fu*king
paid for, and don't get me started on the keyboard and the slow screen refresh
rate) before the unskippable update finished. The update broke my account, so
I had to physically go to a bookstore to have them restore my account, which
is the exact opposite of what I had in mind when purchasing this piece of
utter garbage. Then I started realizing that books on Amazon are like 50%
cheaper than in the Tolino store, and there is no way to buy books on Amazon
and read them on Tolino. Oh, and they don't have a lot of books either,
especially if they're not in German! What a horrible experience, I will never
again buy anything made by Tolino, Thalia or Deutsche Telekom.

------
dabber
Packet Publishing has 50% off as well:

[https://www.packtpub.com/](https://www.packtpub.com/)

~~~
Scipio_Afri
The few books I've dug into from them on python are good and recommended by
the 6.00 series of MIT MOOC on python. Also, free book of theirs is offered
everyday on their website. I'm not sure how long that is going to keep
happening cause I can't imagine them having enough books to keep doing that
with forever.

~~~
kod
I think you misunderestimate the spam cannon that is Packt Publishing. They'll
publish pretty much anything, and seek out authors that don't necessarily know
anything about the topic. They've currently got enough titles to do a free
book per day for something like 10 years, without taking into account new
releases.

Some of their books in specific topic areas are actually good, but in general,
beware.

------
rdl
It is weird how Amazon works - 50% off from the publisher is within a dollar
or two of the regular Kindle price. No DRM and multiple formats is a huge
improvement, but if you have a lot of Kindle books already, being able to
manage everything through the Kindle system is also a benefit.

(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.)

------
PhantomGremlin
Am I dense? When does this "day" start?

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???

~~~
schoen
Apparently you needed a coupon code, which was given elsewhere, and the
promotion ended a few minutes ago.

------
muloka
In case anyone is looking the coupon is RIGHT2READ

~~~
mattl
And here's why...

[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-
read.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html)

------
criddell
The _SparkFun Guide to Processing_ and _Book of Inkscape_ both look very
promising.

The No Starch folks have assembled a really interesting catalog of books.

------
treehau5
Are any of these good? A lot of them look interesting

~~~
carlosgg
Also, Al Sweigart makes available many of his books for free on his website,
including "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python", which also has a lot of
good reviews on Amazon.

[http://inventwithpython.com/index.html](http://inventwithpython.com/index.html)

------
mercurysmessage
Anyone read PoC||GTFO? Looks like it'd be interesting.

~~~
dchest
You can read them online for free
[https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/](https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/)

But the bible must be a better format :-)

~~~
SonOfLilit
Also, they're AMAZING

And if you like them, you may like
[https://www.xorpd.net/pages/xchg_rax/snip_00.html](https://www.xorpd.net/pages/xchg_rax/snip_00.html),
a book of x64 poems (full disclosure: I was a reviewer)

~~~
schoen
I know some assembly, but I'm having a hard time appreciating the poems. Can
you give me some tips on what to notice or consider about them?

~~~
SonOfLilit
They're very much like koans in the sense that there's something to be learned
from each one, they encode some deep gem of knowledge that a master low level
programmer or reverse engineer will probably recognize.

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.

~~~
schoen
Oh, thanks. Somehow I was imagining "poems" in a very different sense. The way
that you've described it makes sense, and I look forward to taking a look at
them with this understanding.

~~~
SonOfLilit
They are poems in both senses, I think. As in, they are designed as works of
exceptional beauty under strict linguistic limitations. They also usually
encode a gem of knowledge.

------
kqr2
Unfortunately the deal is now over.

~~~
jkchu
Still works for me. Use code: RIGHT2READ as mentioned elsewhere in this
thread.

------
jug5
50% off brings most books pretty much in line with other retailers of their
books...

~~~
dabber
Right but it's DRM free, multi format and all the proceeds go directly to the
publisher.

