5 ms·

Amazon sells Kindle versions so there's DRM. But, Google Play store offers PDF and ePub versions of O'Reilly books.

• detaro 9y ago
  > Google Play store offers PDF and ePub versions of O'Reilly books. Oh, interesting, I wasn't aware of that. Thanks!
  • nmusatti 9y ago
    Uhm. I bought "Using SQLite" from Google Play a couple of days ago and the PDF that was available is a Google digitization and not a real O'Reilly PDF, so no index and a slightly worse visual quality. Not an acceptable option for me.
• pacaro 9y ago
  Whether there is DRM on a kindle book is the publishers decision. For example, none of Tor Books' titles have DRM which means you can extract the beautiful screen resolution illustrations from Brandon Sanderson's books. Disclaimer: I work for Amazon, but not on anything Kindle related
  • bambax 9y ago
    Is there a way to know which Kindle books have DRM, and which don't, before purchase?
    • ldjb 9y ago
      There's no easy way to tell, as far as I know. Some books will mention they're DRM-free in the description, but that's not always the case. There are DRM-free books with no such indication until you've actually purchased them.
• clumsysmurf 9y ago
  There are significant problems with both options. For Amazon, when you buy an eBook, you are essentially given a license to use it. Amazon can revoke that - we've all heard of people moving to another country to see their entire library disappear, only (hopefully) remedied after enough hell was raised on some website. As for Play Books, lets imagine you are a Android developer working on the next great thing, and you are an ethical person. Still, you can make a mistake. Suspension of an app is considered a strike against the good standing of your developer account: “Additional suspensions of any nature may result in the termination of your developer account, and investigation and possible termination of related Google accounts.” You would lose everything, eMail, books, etc. So while I don't expect these problems, knowing there is a small possibility, with almost no chance of remedy by a human on the other end, dissuades me from investing lots of money in that ecosystem.
  • cstejerean 9y ago
    If you are an Android developer it seems like it may be a good idea to use a dedicated Google account for Android development and keeping that separate from your personal email account that you use for Gmail, etc.
    • swiley 9y ago
      Google is very good at linking those and it sounds like people have had their non-developer accounts suspended before.
      • HappyTypist 9y ago
        Correct, I've had a Google account suspension result in 4 linked accounts being suspended. The others were restored after an appeal though.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  • imgabe 9y ago
    It's trivial to remove the DRM from Amazon books and save a copy.
• JoshMnem 9y ago
  It seems more difficult to read programming books on a Kindle than as PDFs. I don't know if it's the lack of scrolling on Kindle or something else. I don't think that I would buy another programming book on Kindle.
• chx 9y ago
  It doesn't. O'Reilly customer support just confirmed: > We do not currently have the DRM free PDF versions available from any online re-sellers.