RWH Now In The Kindle Store
May 15th, 2009 by John Goerzen
You’ve been able to get Real World Haskell in a form useful on a Kindle for awhile now, from O’Reilly directly.
Now, RWH is also available for purchase for the Kindle directly from Amazon’s Kindle store — and has a new Kindle Edition page on Amazon. So if you have a Kindle, you can now purchase RWH directly from your Kindle, or have it automatically installed to your Kindle after buying it at Amazon. The Kindle Edition is currently $31.99.
The O’Reilly digital edition is, of course, still available at $39.99. Their edition gives you DRM-free files, and a single purchase gives you multiple formats: PDF, .mobi (Kindle), Sony, iPhone, etc. If you use Safari Books Online, RWH is available there too.
And of course, you can still get a shiny copy to actually sit on your desk. I have one on my desk at work, and still have to explain the beetle on the cover quite regularly. (The explanation is on page 671, right after the index).
I’m excited about the Kindle version. I’ve been reading waaaaay too much since I got my Kindle back in March. I think the Kindle DX would be especially good for a book like this, to reduce wrapping code examples and tables.
It seems perhaps a bit tactless to point this out, but you can pick the same title up at a bookstore, on real paper, for less than either digital edition.
That’s perverse.
I bought the Kindle version mostly to support the book, and I simply used wget to pull a copy of the site because that’s the most useful format.
That said, the kindle version is actually pretty good, a far cry from most Kindle editions. I think the fact that the site is already based on HTML helps a lot.
But there are still some annoying glitches that, frankly, never would have been acceptable in a physical book. In particular, some entries in the TOC are all run together on one line. Again, I don’t read it on the Kindle, so it’s not at issue for me, but I’m not liable to buy books from a publisher that obviously didn’t catch glaring errors in the first twenty pages of a book.
Is the Android version the full blown book? At 5 bucks that’s a steal. Sounds too good to be true. (?)
Rodney,
I’m not actually sure… I’d hope it is, if it’s advertised as such. My guess is “yes” but I can’t tell you for sure. These things sometimes appear without us authors having much visibility into the process.
I had to explain the beetle to my sister-in-law. She saw the book on my wish-list and was like “What is on the cover of that one book?”
I actually didn’t know, but then I checked this site. I am pretty accustomed to tuning out the animals on O’Reilly books anyway. I updated my wish-list this last Christmas to say “It’s a Hercules Beetle” in the description. Still didn’t get it.
So maybe next Christmas… Or maybe 2nd edition will be out then. Or maybe I will break down and buy it myself. About to start grad school after all, where I will be making the big bucks (heh).