TSHOOT Book
This is as close to a rant as I will put on this blog. Don’t get me wrong, I can rant, but there is rarely a reason to rant in public.
I got my TSHOOT book in the mail a couple of days ago. The reading has been slow going in part because I only bought the hard cover. The last version of CCNP books included a pdf of the book on the CD-Rom. Nice. First class even. In this day and age it was refreshing to see a company not try to nickel and dime customers.
Not any more. Now you have to purchase an ebook. I would pay for a pdf of the book like what used to be provided for free. However, that is not how CiscoPress has formatted their new ebook offerings. Check out the this nice press release. Now the customer not only has to purchase the pdf that used to be provided for free, they also have to deal with Adobe DRM on their CiscoPress ebooks and I have decided I won’t pay for that.
I understand that companies need to be able to monetize products, and I agree. I also understand that many of the pdfs ended up on file sharing sites. The way SafariBooksOnline handles pdfs is a great deterrent. Just put my name and customer number all over the document as a watermark. No one would be foolish enough to share content that was so easily traced. Even if I were to edit a watermarked pdf I would be afraid I had missed some metadata.
In the end I just burned a bunch of tokens on SafariBooksOnline and downloaded the whole book, one chapter at a time. I am extremely disappointed in CiscoPress. I would love to tell you how I will never purchase another book from them but they have a captive audience. I will, however, keep a look out for Cisco books from CiscoPress competitors. If you have some favorite Cisco books that are not from CiscoPress please tell me as I am now extremely interested.
Yep! i just noticed that as well. Luckely i came across this on a CiscoPress CCIE book that was given to me. I am gathering the material I need to study for my CCIP and I have not purchased any books yet but I will ONLY read ebooks or pdf’s, I can not stand hard cover books anymore.
It pisses me off too that publishers have to go through these steps but no one is going to take the time to write a book or publish it if there is no money in it. I would rather jump through a few hoops to get quality material than have to dig through cisco.com for the information i need.
You know what kills me about the whole book scenario is that I could have not even purchased the CiscoPress hardcover book and used SafarBooksOnline instead. I guess that is what I will do in the future. If you are used to reading books on the computer like we are, it makes sense. I have a ten slot bookshelf provided by work that is awesome. Whatever project I am working on at the moment if I need solid reference material I just use SBO. They even have some older books that are difficult to find in hard cover, I recommend it.