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.