Comments on: The ebook experience: Packt versus Manning

By: Ryan Ginstrom

Ryan Ginstrom — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 05:37:30 +0000

@tanay

I don’t condone piracy at all, and I hope that you go ahead and buy a copy of your book. But your comment is a good example of the fact that these anti-piracy measures only hurt paying customers. The pirates will always find a way to circumvent whatever measures you put in place. Meanwhile, people actually paying for these books have to suffer with a degraded and less useful product.

The latest Packt book I’m reading (dead tree version, of course) has a big blurb in the front about anti-piracy, urging us to report any copies we find online. Now we’re supposed to do their jobs for them. I just wish they had spent the anti-piracy money on better copy editing for the book.

By: tanay

tanay — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 05:24:15 +0000

hence i get pirated versions of packt ebooks
they are free, non irritating and allow copy paste..

packt go to hell.
if you like the book go to the author’s homepage and there will be a donate button

By: yakiimo02

yakiimo02 — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 15:53:26 +0000

Hi, thanks for the reply. Ah, glad to hear that Manning doesn’t display your address. I’ll definitely choose Manning if both Packt and Manning offer similiar books with no other deciding factor; the DRM will be the deciding factor for me too. I’m gonna update my blog with this info. Thanks.
Thanks for the info on FePy. I did take a look at it since I read somewhere that it includes BeautifulSoup, but FePy was out of date with the newest version of IronPython and had very little documentation. I’m actually a newbie at Python itself, so IronPython turned out to be too overwhelming for me. Maybe I’ll give IronPython another try after I see more people using it.

By: Ryan Ginstrom

Ryan Ginstrom — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 12:20:20 +0000

@yakiimo02

Thanks for the comment and post. I haven’t tried IronPython with BeautifulSoup, but googling around it looks possible but non-trivial. The FePy project appears to have a rewritten version for IP as well.

“I’m assuming that Manning doesn’t do this?”

That’s right. Manning only displays your name and email — another point in favor of Manning.

By: yakiimo02

yakiimo02 — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 10:51:08 +0000

Hi, thanks for the interesting post. I previously ordered a book from Packt Publishing and the thing that really annoyed me was that they print your name and address on every single page of the e-book. If you open up the e-book at work and someone comes to talk to you, they have a chance of seeing your home address. That seemed incredibly invasive to me as they are forcing you to display your personal information anywhere you read the book. I’m assuming that Manning doesn’t do this?
Also your IronPython purchase is interesting to me as I thought about buying that book a little while back too! I wanted to use Python’s BeautifulSoup while creating the GUI with .Net. However, my initial mucking around with IronPython was too frustrating and I decided to just write the GUI in C# and call Python scripts as a separate process. The general lack of information, the only experimental integration with visual studio, the lack of support for useful CPython libraries, made me think IronPython was more hassle than it’s worth if you know C#. Maybe I gave up too early and I hope you have better luck with it.
Also, I hope you don’t mind, but I made a blog entry, http://d.hatena.ne.jp/yakiimo02/20081026/1225016809, about this post comparing the two e-book retailers.
Thanks for the interesting article.