DanloRingess's dashboard

Tim,

Thanks for your response. I'm of mixed feelings about lack of support for PDF on the Kindle. There is a lot of PDF content out there and I suspect a future version of the Kindle will end up supporting it despite what Amazon may wish to be the reality.

In the meantime, I'm not sure I really understand your complaints. You effectively use DRM with your Safari service by limiting what customers are able to download and access at one time. Amazon does seem to support large variety of formats other than PDF. Given that O'Reilly is not in the habit of making your company's works available for free, it seems strange that you wouldn't be willing to support the Amazon "proprietary" format.

As far as I can tell, Amazon does not require you to sell your titles only through their website. You can make them available there as well as through your own store. I haven't investigated whether they allow you to sell titles in their AZW format elswhere or not. However, since the Kindle can read other formats (besides PDF), you could make the books available from your website in a format such as Microsoft Word that would allow customers to purchase from you and still use the books on a Kindle.

In short, I don't care who I have to purchase the books from. I would like O'Reilly titles to be available on my Kindle which will be arriving in the next few days.

Please answer for me:

1) How does Amazon require you to sell only through their website and only in their proprietary format. I may be missing this in what I have read from their Digital Text Platform documentation. I would prefer to be an educated consumer.

2) Why is PDF so important to you vs. other formats? That is, why not also support other formats?

Thank you for your consideration.

-Rodney

Thanks for the quick reply. Every time I check, it seems that few if any of the books that I'm interested in are available in PDF form. Safari Books Online is a neat idea, but I'm not spending over $400 a year to only be able to download 5 chapters per month.

In a given year, I spend probably $300 on technical books. Those books tend to be O'Reilly books. I understand the Kindle is new and you might not be able to support it right away.

But, please count this as a vote for future support as soon as possible.