5 Dec 2008

InformIT, the new addiction

As of current writing, I've currently purchased 6 ebooks from InformIT, Pearson Education's IT book portal. It's seriously addictive! There're two very good reasons why this is.

  1. Their newer ebooks are non-DRM, straight PDFs. You can view them using any PDF reader; on my computer, this happens to be Evince, but anything else should work. This is much akin to MP3: 100% compatible; just as you can play MP3s on all music players, you can view PDFs on all document viewers.
  2. When you first sign up, you get a 35%-off coupon to spend at their store; every purchase you make, they give you another 35%-off coupon for your next purchase. This incredibly clever marketing technique means that you'll keep coming back to their store when you want more books (at least ones published by Pearson's companies); in many cases, they even undercut Amazon.

So next time you're hunting for a computer book, you know where to go! :-)