Sometimes... stuff happens

I like books from The Pragmatic Bookshelf, I mean, who doesn’t?  I would think not many people especially if you’re in the Ruby/Rails community.  If you haven’t already noticed, I wanted to share a few things i’m thinking every other book publisher should look into.

Did anyone notice a few months back when they started offering the downloading of book in multiple formats?  For readers using ereaders or iphones, this is huge!  Not only do they support pdf but now also have mobi and epub formats available. When reading books at night I was using my ipod touch + the Stanza app + pdf book of choice.  This wasn’t great but it was one of the better ways to get pdf support on the iphone/ipod.  Now with the epub format available as a download in addition to my normal pdf download… I can easily read Pragmatic books at night.

With all of that being said… has anyone noticed that Pragmatic has a fantasticly simple iphone/ipod interface to your bookshelf?  Try it out, you won’t be sorry.  If you don’t currently have a book from your shelf on the iphone/ipod it will load it on using a stanza link.  Once you click the book you want the Stanza app will open and begin to download the epub formatted book for your viewing pleasure.

What I wanted to convey with this post was that accessibility is really king when it comes to your owned media.  Probably ended up sounding more like Pragprog fandom, but was really intended to show what the future could be.  If anyone knows of other publishers doing this same thing or something similar with their media… please let me know in the comments.