Do you remember I went back to using the Reader with proper (ePub) content? It also turned out pretty well when I could get a newly-released book even before it’s released in Europe (and for a much lower price).
A month after resuming this, I have to accept an absurd reality: it’s much easier to find novels than technical books in ePub format! Now it is true that most of the O’Reilly catalogue is available in ePub format (one exception being CJKV Information Processing which, for the complexity of the script, is only available as PDF — and it would still have been pretty expensive, if I couldn’t make it to the 1-day offer the other day of getting any eBook for $10; for that price, even just a PDF is good enough), but they seem to be an exception.
Indeed, Addison Wesley does not seem to have their catalogue available as eBook at all! And they tend to have some very interesting books – some of which I read thanks to the gifts received – if they had them available as eBook, I would probably be buying a few more of them!
Tonight I was also looking at MIT Press since I would like to convert my current shelf to eBooks, for those titles that I’m still interesting to have around, and which are available as eBook obviously; Using OpenMP is one of them — my idea was to know ho much they would cost me as eBook, which is usually a fraction of their original price, and “sell” them for the same price to interested friends. While they do have an eBook store, it doesn’t have their older titles, and it leaves a lot to be desired.
My reason for wanting to convert what I have already is that I’m getting ready to pack and get the hell away from home; lots of things are going on and I’m in the middle of a very nasty family situation. I’ll be looking for my luck elsewhere, most likely in Turin, hopefully later on this year. But before leaving, I’m trying to get rid of some baggage, both psychological and physical; books are something that, while I’d be sad splitting from, I cannot afford to bring with me when I’ll be moving.
Incidentally, I’m in a bit of a pinch with CDs and DVDs as well… I already rip all my CDs and the music DVDs to bring them with me more easily on the iPod — but I don’t want to get rid of the originals; I guess that once I move I might still get some “physical storage space” here, to keep them. I already moved to buying music digitally – through the iTunes store, thankfully they don’t have DRM any more! – but audiobooks are still crippled protected, as they tell you, and metal loses some edges when encoded. Let’s not even get into digitally-distributed movies. And yes, I’m the kind of person who gladly pays for content.
On the other hand, for what concerns fiction and non-fiction books, there are quite a few possible stores, such as WHSmith Kobo and Waterstones (Update 2023-03-06: turns out that Kobo bought out the Waterstones eBook Store as well, in 2016!) — the only problem I got with them is that none of them supports a wishlist; I’d love to replace the one I have now on Amazon with one for eBook: they’d be cheaper and I’d have less trouble bringing them around.
Anyway, I’m still baffled by the lack of vast archives of technical eBooks.
Sorry for the unrelated comment but I sent you an e-mail the other day about libtool and I was wondering if you got it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it went to spam. Otherwise, while I admit I’m not the best for replying to e-mails, I think it was a relatively simple question.