This just in from the marketing department (also known as Shayne, the marketing guy):
SitePoint goes mobile
I wonder how many people don’t know what PDF stands for. Portable Document Format, that’s what! Well, we’ve got a whole collection of them and they’re all online ready to be sold as a package or on their own. Friends of SitePoint, your wish is our command: SitePoint books have gone mobile.
That’s right—the entire SitePoint book library* is now available in the pocket-sized, instant-gratification-compatible PDF format, in addition to the popular dead tree format. For the first time, all our black-and-white titles can now be viewed with full color screenshots!
Now whenever you buy a book direct from SitePoint you get to choose
- the hardcopy version delivered to your door,
- the PDF version delivered to your inbox ($10 off the cover price!), or
- both formats (only $10 extra!).
Oh, and if you want to upgrade to the PDF version of a book (or books) that you already own, just drop our sales team a line and they’ll gladly hook you up with our special $10 upgrade price.
* “The CSS Anthology” is an exception right now, as we’re busy clearing an overstock of the paper version. The good news is that our current discounted pricing on this title makes it cheaper than the PDF would be! Please also note that this only covers our books—not our kits.
May 9th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
This is great news.
May 9th, 2007 at 9:59 pm
That’s great for many people. However, I wonder if SitePoint has considered the potential risk of providing PDF copies of their books as this might lead to more pirated material spreading all over the web.
May 10th, 2007 at 12:34 am
good news, and about time as well… i have to wonder why it took you so long?
for me, it’s good news as it’s a good thing for the environment, global warming, have to save the planet etc.
dr livingston, a lot less grumpier.
May 10th, 2007 at 2:42 am
Sweet!
May 10th, 2007 at 3:05 am
pdf rox….it is the future…no more printed books :)
May 10th, 2007 at 9:44 am
We do what we can, but nothing is unbreakable.
May 10th, 2007 at 10:04 am
Great stuff. Less risk of overstocking certain books now, but I guess you may still generate too many PDFs and waste disk space. Cheaper than physical storage though.
By the way you might want to update the PHP Anthology price on the main book list page… still listed as $63.90 for the no longer available printed versions.
May 11th, 2007 at 1:20 am
Are the old book (like for example dhtml utopia) PDFs updated with the latest errata for that book? I think your price for pdfs is a little bit high. I think it is best at 50% discount off the printed book.
May 11th, 2007 at 1:25 am
Something tells me they might have thought of that once or twice.
May 11th, 2007 at 9:58 am
Yes, the PDFs have been updated with corrections for all known errata.
As for the pricing, we’re happy with our current price level. Since it costs less than $10 to print a book, the $10 discount for the PDF version of the exact same content (but in portable, printable, color format!) is more than fair, we feel.
May 12th, 2007 at 12:08 am
Great to hear…. However: are you guys not scared that the Sitepoint PDF books end up distributed in P2P networks like Bittorrent?
May 12th, 2007 at 4:29 am
I wish they were available in .chm format as well.
May 12th, 2007 at 5:41 am
I second this. CHM-format is my preferred choice for offline ebooks. I hope that SitePoint would consider them.
May 16th, 2007 at 3:14 am
A Google search shows that many of the Sitepoint books have been available on bit-torrent sites for awhile. I’m sure the PDF versions will be there any minute now. Shame.
May 19th, 2007 at 5:15 am
I seem to be the only one, but I still prefer having the books in book form as opposed to PDF.
I like to read them in the car or on the train, so a book version helps. Even when I’m consulting them at my PC, I prefer using the book to a PDF.
Sorry trees.
May 19th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
Ok but with your small laptop you can have always with you your entire odf library. You can’t bring with you all your normal books :)
May 24th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
pdf format is easily readable compared to chm format
thanks for switching
June 28th, 2007 at 1:12 am
Just a quick comment - love the news style books and it’s great they’re in PDF format too. One thing though; this page manages to crash IE6 every time I try to load it - Firefox seems to be okay though.
September 3rd, 2007 at 4:21 pm
You should put some kind of key in every downloadable pdf and have a database of those keys and related users, so you’d know which user made his/her copy available on torrent.
September 3rd, 2007 at 5:26 pm
We do, but, like with any security measure, nothing is ever impregnable if you have enough time and the right tools.