Cupcake 40431's dashboard

I've bought a lot of ebooks from Apress. They use the buyer's email address as a pw to read the pdf. I think that's an acceptable compromise for some security. Maybe that would be acceptable for those of your authors that are hesitant to make their work available electronically?

I for one is very, very glad to be able to purchase PDFs. They are so much more convenient than the dead tree format.

That one is staged for release and should be available w/in the next two days. I hesitate giving you an exact date because we're working through some issues that resulted from an upgrade of our backend accounting system.

In this particular case, do you have a general timeline of when an electronic download of the mentioned OS X leopard book would be available?

It sounds like something I would like to have around, but I really have no use for paper books anymore.

Hello JJ,

In general we try to make PDFs available as quickly as we can. In some cases that's before the pbook is available, but more often than not it's at the same time or soon after. However, there are exceptions. For example, the head of one of our divisions wants a six-week period to elapse between release of the pbook and ebook in order to support our retail partners. In other cases we have authors who are concerned about piracy, and therefore don't want us to sell ebooks at all. (Interesting that in most of those cases you can find an ebook version on filesharing sites because someone scanned it themselves.) Lastly, in still other cases it takes time to convert some books to PDF for obscure layout reason,s though we're working through those as we can.

Despite all this, realize that you can usually get the book you're looking for via our Safari Books Online system with a monthly subscription. The great thing about Safari is that you get access to thousands of books from all the best technical book publishers, along with a growing library of video content. And our books usually appear there either before they're available in print.

I hope this helps.

--Allen