In general, I prefer paper books over e-books so I’m a bit biased to begin with. I reviewed Murach’s Beginning Java with NetBeans book and suspected that I would recommend the equivalent Murach’s Beginning Java with Eclipse book more strongly because Eclipse is more marketable. But I didn’t want to recommend a book I hadn’t seen. Since most of the book is the same and Murach books are thick, it seemed like a waste to mail me another book so I asked for an e0book. Plus I was never going to read the whole book; just the Eclipse specific sections.
Murach uses a special LockLizard reader. Installing it wasn’t hard. Murach emailed me a license file to get started. I double clicked on it and it installed. Same for the book – I double clicked and it opened. Odd to have to install special software, but ok. And it met my needs since I wasn’t reading the whole book. They do have an iPad reader so I could have read it on my iPad if I wanted.
The problem I had with the Mac reader is that Murach uses a “paired pages” format. Which is great. However, the Mac reader at least doesn’t display those pages together. It can display two pages at the same time. But the right pages aren’t paired.
Thanks for the warning, I will never buy an ebook from that publisher.
A special app for reading books is needed? So I have no chance to read the book on my dedicated reading device?
And their app description is revealing: “The Windows Viewer lets you view the pages of our books in pairs, just as they were intended to be read. As a result, this is an excellent Viewer for reading our books, especially on computers with large screens. ”
NO! Sorry. Someone who writes this has no idea at all what reading or designing an ebook means. “Intended to read”??? The whole point of semantic ebook formats is to get rid of this to display the book in the best way possible for the current device. Otherwise it is just barely usable on… oh, there it is: “computers with large screens”.
Of course it is hard to get ebooks when publisher in 2015 still are able to offer such proof of professional incompetence. PDF as an ebook format is bad enough. It is so bad that it legitimately can’t be called an ebook format (it is for layout accurate documents, something completely different).
But this solution with dedicate reading software that even enforces a page arrangement is far worse.
Don’t judge ebooks in general by this worst of the worst solutions.
I’ve tried other e-books. My preference for paper books has nothing to do with one specific provider.