Buying my Books

Buying a book is getting pretty complicated these days, here’s a summary of the options for buying my books in electronic and paper forms.

• if you want a paper copy only, then buy from InformIT, Amazon, or your favorite book store.

• If you want an ebook, then your choice depends on the format you’d like

  • If you like Amazon’s Kindle, and you like to use their store, then buy a kindle copy through Amazon

  • If you want other formats, or not be tied to Amazon, then InformIT’s option is pretty good. Buying an ebook from them allows you to freely download ebooks in epub, pdf, and MOBI formats. (MOBI is Kindle’s format, you copy the book onto your Kindle). The ebooks are watermarked but do not have DRM.

• InformIT also offers a package with both paper and ebook.

My newer books are available in both electronic and paper form, but my less-well selling older books are only available as physical books.

Ebooks will look different on various devices due to both the device characteristics and the way in which the conversion was done. I don’t get to see the books on all devices, so can’t tell which devices work well for which books. I have seen most epub books on my iPad, which look pretty good. Smaller format devices tend to do badly with diagrams and code samples. The toolchain we used for DSL and NoSQL Distilled made it easy to create well-formed ebooks, but older books were done by the publisher with a more awkward process which I thankfully wasn’t involved in.

I have links for InformIT and Amazon on my site for each book. InformIT is the web presence of Pearson, my publisher. (Pearson owns the Addison-Wesley imprint.) I have the Amazon link since they are such a big presence. But there are other booksellers out there and you shouldn’t consider my links to be any particular endorsement. I am enrolled in affiliate programs for Amazon and InformIT, so I do get a small cut if you buy via my links.

Martin Fowler: 24 Aug 2012