In between pushing the ePub based Open Book Framework, and claiming that Amazon will lose their lead unless they open up the Kindle, O’Reilly publishing decided to start selling 160 O’Reilly Media titles at the Kindle Store.
The books are being sold without any DRM. Text To Speech aka Read To Me is enabled so you can hear your favorite coding examples in your favorite algorithmically rendered voice.
O’Reilly Media are quick to point out -
- They will be adding more books to the Kindle Store -
… expect to add another 100 or so titles in the coming weeks.
- The remaining of their 400 titles are held up by the lack of table support for Kindle 1 -
… the number for sale on Kindle will be limited until Amazon updates Kindle 1 to support table rendering.
- Lack of support for showing code and lack of table support held them back.
- As did the ’compulsory’ DRM required by Amazon. Which, obviously, isn’t compulsory any more.
- Love how they manage to sound patronizing, even as they supposedly thank Amazon, -
While the rendering in Kindle 2 still leaves a bit to be desired, we felt it was an acceptable baseline, and look forward to continuing to work with them to improve the display of technical content on Kindle. (Ironically, the Kindle 2 web browser displays complex content like tables and code quite well — check out the Bookworm mobile version if you have a Kindle.)
Our thanks do go to Amazon for working with us on this. They’re a favorite target of criticism (often right here, and often for good reason),
- And they manage to mention, in passing, the story of the one single Kindle owner, ever, who has been locked out of his Kindle account.
- Finally, they request their readers to contact Amazon customer support and ask Amazon to support technical books as well as their eReader rivals (who was it that said comparisons are odious?) -
If you want to tell Amazon to hurry up and update your Kindle 1, or to improve their rendering of technical content to match Sony Reader, Stanza, Bookworm, Calibre, and others, you can drop them a line at kindle-feedback@amazon.com.
Aah – the joy of seeing O’Reilly kicking and shouting and protesting, and yet, being dragged, against their will, to the Kindle Store.
BTW, here’s their article – you have to admit it’s pretty hilarious to see a fanatical open standard advocate sell their content within an obvious walled garden.
Filed under: books Tagged: | kindle content, o'reilly capitulate
