good books

[Andreas Kostyrka]

Am Mit, 2002-07-24 um 10.40 schrieb Alex Martelli:
> By the way, while probably not a saving of money, if you prefer online
> material consider O'Reilly's "Safari" offering.  Several other publishers
Well, they do not allow offline usage (they even explicitly forbid
things like "web robots" to spider the content).
And it's a "renting" schema, because you can only replace books. (To add
books you have to increase your monthly payment.)
Sorry guys, this is a library like service. I can get most of these
books also at my local university library. :) [for free].

A book I can put in a bag. A online-only ebook I cannot put on my laptop
when I'm working outside.

Now I'm a big fan of ebooks but only without any hint of "DRM".

<rant> For example I mostly buy science fiction books on
www.webscription.net (www.baen.com), because I can use(read) them
without any troubles.

The funny thing is, that I haven't yet have the opportunity to pirate my
ebook collection. Why should I, when the prices are that attractive?
</rant>

> are together with O'Reilly's in the "Safari" scheme, but I'm not familiar
> with the other publishers' online offerings -- I do know however that
> O'Reilly's are excellent.  I love books, real, solid, physical paper
> books -- my house and study are both chock full of them -- but online
> material does have its own pluses too.  People with eyesight problems
> are probably most sensitive to those pluses -- the worse your eyesight,
> the more the possibility of using screen readers appeals.  But even
> for you eagle-eyed guys, such pluses as searching and copy-and-paste
> should not be ignored.
Well, for many users, internet is a metered commodity. (Most often
metered by the minute.) So requiring being online can be quite
expensive. OTOH, DRM encrypted content is also problematic. Well, I
deleted my Windows partition after 9 months not having booted it.

Andreas