I’m probably a bit behind the times, but I’ve just tried Amazon’s “Book Upgrade” program for the first time.
The gist of it - you pay an additional fee (not necessarily small). In turn, Amazon provides you with an online version of the book. You can search through its contents, you can place bookmarks, and you can even add notes.
A view into one of my books
It’s really amazing - ultimately, it means having your tech lib with all your annotations online and searchable. Sure, it has some drawbacks. Sometimes, pages are not scanned in properly - which is kind of amusing, as long as you still get the whole page picture.
A slightly bigger problem is the fact that you need Amazons Online Reader to read your data - you don’t have an open file format. In a way, it’s understandable - freely copyable books will probably not generate quite enough revenue to justify publishing them.
This also means that you do not have an offline copy of your books. Theoretically, it’s not a big deal. Practically, it means that access to your data is at the whim of Amazon and the Internet. For now, I’d still recommend getting books in paper - but I consider the additional money more a one-time fee that gives me the added benefit of online search. If I can find only one thing 20 minutes faster than by digging through books, this has more than paid for itself.
http://safari.oreilly.com/ Why even order the paper copy!
Hi Robert, bit surprised to see that page on your blog! Interesting, I had no idea Amazon offered that service. First impression, I’m of a mixed opinion: it’s good for the reader, obviously, but at the same time it’s somewhat annoying that Amazon is making money off my work without me seeing a penny of it.