I think this is fantastic news. Any likelihood of safari support on the Kindle? That would really make me extremely happy.

I realise you can almost get access to the content via the browser, but the experience is less than great. Kindle with safari subscription seems like the perfect compliment. (or an O'Reilly book reader)

@Gordon -- You may find the mobile version of Safari (m.safaribooksonline.com) is a better experience from the Kindle browser. Safari is working on new features to support Kindle downloads (for books you've downloaded via tokens).

andrew said:
> 160 O'Reilly books are now available on Kindle

good news! congratulations!

-bowerbird

p.s. how are your tables stored? as .html tables?

This is awesome.

Some Kindle books are now available without DRM? That's great news!

Glad to hear books can be unencumbered on the Kindle. Now if only that fact was displayed on the book page.

what would be really nice is if the institutional subscriptions allowed you transfer books to your mobile device - with or without drm

The tables stayed as HTML in the Mobi/.prc, yes. We're not happy with all the downsides of pictures of tables as a workaround, especially loss of search & ability to link.

and i presume you do not convert them to pure text
because of the absence of a kindle monospaced font?

-bowerbird

@bowerbird: In early February, both Kindle 1 (via a software update) & Kindle 2 (via not being released yet) got monospace font support.

While pure text is an option, when we're talking about a generic solution for hundreds of titles and want to allow them to be read on different screen sizes (Kindle iPhone App) it starts to fall apart.

Besides, if we dumb down all of our content to suit the limitations of the current Kindle they'll have no incentive to improve their rendering engine.

keith said:
> In early February, both Kindle 1 (via a software update) &
> Kindle 2 (via not being released yet) got monospace font support.

oh, ok, i didn't know that. i thought it was still lacking...

> While pure text is an option, when we're talking about
> a generic solution for hundreds of titles and
> want to allow them to be read on different screen sizes
> (Kindle iPhone App) it starts to fall apart.

well, keith, if you'd care to discuss some of the specifics of that,
my job/hobby/mission in life is solving those kinds of problems.

indeed, if you'd care to pull a wide assortment of tables out of
your books, so the general e-book programming community
would have a communal input dataset to address these issues,
that would be cool.

> Besides, if we dumb down all of our content
> to suit the limitations of the current Kindle
> they'll have no incentive to improve their rendering engine.

first of all, nobody is suggesting you "dumb down" your content.
quite to the contrary, the suggestion is that perhaps you could
make it _smarter_, so that it does the job that it intends to do
even in a rendering environment that's not as nice as we'd like...

and second of all, a very good guess is that amazon has _more_
than enough "incentive" to "improve their rendering engine",
no matter _what_ o'reilly (or any publisher) does or does not do,
so i'm not sure that principle has much ground to stand on here.

but, more to the point, i believe that you will find, as i have,
that when you are working out these table-oriented problems,
you come up against some difficult either/or type conundrums.

when i reach such a conundrum, i'll generally make a decision,
one way or the other, and then proceed, with my path at times
(and perhaps even often) being affected by the choice i'd made.

and i would expect that amazon will act in much the same way.

so i'd say that if you _really_ want amazon to "improve", then
it would be a good thing for you to offer amazon some _input_
on _how_ you would like them to answer some of the questions
that they will inevitably face. that means you will need to know
_what_ the questions are, and _what_ you prefer as the answers.

pulling that wide assortment of tables out of your books would
help you -- and me, and stanza, and amazon, and everyone --
know the questions, and start thinking to formulate the answers.

otherwise, prepare to be unhappy because amazon makes some
decisions that are not the same as what you would've suggested.

-bowerbird

so i'd say that if you _really_ want amazon to "improve", then it would be a good thing for you to offer amazon some _input_ on _how_ you would like them to answer some of the questions that they will inevitably face. that means you will need to know _what_ the questions are, and _what_ you prefer as the answers.

We have regular and ongoing conversations with the Kindle team. We've provided them with ALL of our ebooks in both EPUB and Mobipocket format, and have exchanged feedback, suggestions, and workarounds with the Kindle team (in fact the addition of monospaced fonts and tables to Kindle 2 was heavily influenced by our input to Amazon).

Thanks for including four of my own books as DRM free. Covered at my site

I noticed that the DRM version of one of the books at least is still showing. Anyway that can be removed, so that people who bought the DRM version have access to the DRM free version? And also to ensure that people only get access to the DRM free version?

I've also tagged the books "drmfree" to match the MobileRead and Teleread campaign.

I'll pass that along to our Kindle contacts at Amazon, thank you.

keith said:
> We have regular and ongoing conversations
> with the Kindle team. We've provided them with ALL
> of our ebooks in both EPUB and Mobipocket format,
> and have exchanged feedback, suggestions, and
> workarounds with the Kindle team (in fact the
> addition of monospaced fonts and tables to Kindle 2
> was heavily influenced by our input to Amazon).

great. so magnanimous of the two of you to do all that for us.

except now how about having these conversations _in_public_?

or is it your expectation that you can just dictate your decisions
to the rest of the e-book community, and we'll just follow along?

for all the preaching that comes out of o'reilly on "open source",
there seems to be a lot about _open_processes_ you don't grok.

and i say that with _love_, keith, so don't get bent out of shape.

-bowerbird

sorry, i got the attributions wrong.

i thought keith and i were having a conversation.

but that was actually _andrew_ who responded last.
(and something tells me i could have known that,
even without looking to see what name was listed.)

my apologies to both keith and andrew for the mix-up.

-bowerbird

Wait, wait wait--here's what I don't get RE "Compulsory" DRM.

I mean, obviously, the inevitable backtracking on Kindle store availability had to happen. Your competitors found a way. And, after all, O'Reilly already pulled down a million from the suckers at the last Tools of Change by claiming Epub on Iphone was the future. Mission accomplished, and it's not as though anyone who bought into that garbage will be able to afford to come back as a paying customer.

However, at no point in Kindle's history was it required for a publisher to employ DRM. Mobi does it by default, but that's more related to Mobi's founders leaving long ago, and certain Gallic predilections among Mobipocket's remaining staffers. DTP.Amazon.com does not require DRM, or even make it easy to use DRM.

So, in your post above, which is the lie? That someone at Kindle told you, repeatedly, how DRM was required, over O'Reilly's constant, vociferous protests? Or that you're "constantly in touch" with their staffers?

No, I mean, seriously. You've previously lied about some sort of industry-wide take-up of Adobe Mobile, when the problems were revealed last summer with even InDesign-alone conversions. And the "take-up" had clearly not occurred by Sept?

You kept up the nonsense into this winter, conning nearly 1k persons out of $1 million in reg. fees.

You're now backtracking, speciously, to save the whole publishing side of things on Kindle.

But given that you're now lying about "compulsory DRM" on Kindle, what's to stop the same sort of firms who've found Amazon a tasty target from nailing you guys?

Particularly given that you're, like, culpable?

@dmoynihan -- You're right about DTP not requiring DRM, but we (like most publishers) don't use DTP to sell titles via Amazon. That's handled through other mechanisms. And yes, Amazon told us that we could not sell on Kindle without DRM, and we repeatedly (vociferously) protested.

The new Amazon ingestion workflow allowing us to sell unencrypted mobi files is the first time they've done so for a non-DTP submission (i.e, the source of the vast majority of Kindle titles).

oh no. bowerbird and moynihan tag-teaming against o'reilly?

say it ain't so, joe. totally unfair.

either one of us could do it with one hand tied behind our back.

david indelicately employs the l-word.

but hey, don't attribute to duplicity what is clearly incompetence.

andrew has already said he doesn't understand the d.r.m. stuff.
it just went over his head went the stanza people discussed it...

and besides, hasn't david rothman been proving for a while now
that amazon forces d.r.m., even on publishers who don't want it?
(if you repeat something enough times, you've proven it. right?)

see, _that_ is the problem here.

long-time know-nothings like teleblawg rothman tell untruths,
which newcomer know-nothings like the interloper kids echo,
and should-know-better publishing/tech "leaders" like o'reilly
then give it all a -- fully undeserved -- stamp of authenticity...

so really, is it any wonder that the corporate publishing industry,
which has real skin in the game, ignores all these knuckleheads?

not that the dinosaurs are any smarter. heck, they be dinosaurs!
they'll fall for anybody who comes by with a shiny d.r.m. scheme.

and meanwhile amazon is hooking every hook and zippering all
of its zippers and snapping each snap to lock down its lock-in...

and the web is stealing attention away from books just as surely
as it is stealing attention away from newspapers and magazines.

good thing gas prices went down, so air-flights are reasonable
once again, which means the _conference_ business is thriving,
so o'reilly will be able to keep the cash in its cash-flow flowing,
enabling 'em to keep the confusion-about-publishing tide up,
so the conference attendees keep piling through the turnstyles.

-bowerbird

david said:
> You're now backtracking, speciously,
> to save the whole publishing side of things on Kindle.
...
> what's to stop the same sort of firms who've found Amazon
> a tasty target from nailing you guys?
> Particularly given that you're, like, culpable?

david, most people reading along here have a very superficial
understanding of the full situation -- drm bad! epub good! --
and little knowledge of the history, so i'd suggest you need to
be far less cryptic.

and the l-word -- even if it's totally true -- is a bit abrasive,
even by my standards (and i've been told i don't have any), so
perhaps some rephrasing would be good? ;+)

-bowerbird

The Kindle DX looks nice but I'm waiting for Plastic Logic's Reader. Since it will support the pdf file format directly and has a big screen it'll hopefully not suffer from the same table problems.

A bit off topic but the idea of PL's Reader with Safari access (it has BT/wi-fi/GSM 3G) would be like something out of Star Trek. =) How about "Buy a two year Safari subscription for $62.99 per month and get a free ebook reader."?

I am currently investigating kindle dx reviews online and the fact that oreilly offers DRM free books for it may sway me enough to buy one.

I already bought a bunch of ebooks from oreilly, will the mobi format I already have look the same as the "kindle" version?

By the way, kudos on the whole no DRM thing. I've bought a few hundred dollars worth of books in the last few weeks from oreilly because of that.
Well, that, and the books are good...