The Free Beer post below made me think of the whole eBook thing again. <\/p>\n
I currently receive a number of magazine subscriptions in electronic format, and I love it. It takes bloody ages for hardcopy magazines to make it all the way to Australia, and I have no problem at all reading PDF versions of magazines on flights, etc. Worst case, I can print out the specific articles and read them in the proverbial.<\/p>\n
So why are eBooks so unsatisfying, when magazines in this format rock?<\/p>\n
Part of it for me comes back to updates. Magazines are almost meant to be transient (although don’t mention the boxes of Delphi Magazine, DDJ, etc back issues I have in my garage), but books are supposed to be longer lived. As far as I can tell, most eBooks don’t come with updates. The Indy book<\/a> is one exception, but I wish more eBook publishers would treat them like software. Give me minor updates for free, and charge me (a reduced amount) for major upgrades, or let me subscribe so I get everything for a year.<\/p>\n eBooks give publishers the cost model of software, but they don’t seem very keen to pass on the other benefits to end users.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Free Beer post below made me think of the whole eBook thing again. I currently receive a number of magazine subscriptions in electronic format, and I love it. It takes bloody ages for hardcopy magazines to make it all the way to Australia, and I have no problem at all reading PDF versions of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.malcolmgroves.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}