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I’m highly disappointed
eric.torstenson March 15, 2011 16:16

Adobe Digital Editions is a big mistake.

ebook purchase from google books was extremely disappointing. I have been learning about web development, and my first experience with electronic books was a purchase from pragpub about rails. I have since bought 2 other books from them, and look forward to others. However, after my experience with Adobe's hobbling of your book Javascript, the missing manual will never purchase another electronic book from O'Reilly (nor do I expect to purchase these sorts of books in paper format again, since they work much better as PDFs).

With the download I got from google books, I was unable to use Find. Um, that's the one primary reason to get electronic copy. I know there is a page with some useful text on it...I can search...well, not this one... Next, the book isn't formatted properly, so the table of contents doesn't show up in the side bar. If you are going to use ADE, you might as well invest in porting the book over entirely.

(edited again as the lameness continues to add up)
Lack of copy means you should actually use things like active links since I can't copy. There are references to additional documentation for jquery site and I have to type them in manually.

(edited after actually reading through some of the book)
After working through a number of chapters, I've decided this is a completely useless product. See the attached picture of how nice the fonts look. Some parts are readable at full screen, others look like a bad scanned image from 1982. Hopefully you guys have better technology available to you-but, I'm seriously starting to wonder. This is shot from a widescreen monitor oriented portrait...so, it's a nice 21'' screen tall.

If I see that O'Reilly has moved to a more modern approach to publications, maybe I'll be a customer again, but not until it's perfectly obvious that you've ditched ADE and allowed customers to actually use the books in ways that make them most useful.
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  • EMPLOYEE
    Rachel James (Web Producer) March 15, 2011 19:27
    Hi Eric,

    Thanks for getting in touch with us about this, and I'm sorry for the disappointment. We're concerned by the description of your experience with the ebook purchased from Google ebooks, because our epub files should be searchable, linked, and consistently readable in Adobe Digital Editions and other readers. The ebooks team is researching what the problem is.

    In the meantime, I'd like to offer you the ebook bundle of JavaScript: The Missing Manual from oreilly.com, which includes epub and PDF as well as three other formats. You'll just need a free oreilly.com account, which you can create at https://members.oreilly.com/account/login. Once you've created the account, let me know what your username is, and I'll add the ebook bundle to your account.

    Thank you for taking the time to write us about this, so that we can resolve the issue.

    Regards,

    Rachel James
    O'Reilly Media
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  • eric.torstenson March 16, 2011 15:17
    Hi Rachel,

    After reading your response, I switched to the other download (I got both the PDF and epub, but ADE doesn't really make it clear which is which). You are correct, search and select does work on the other. So, the problem I was having is with the PDF-which looks more like it's a snapshot of the pages, since the font shows so poorly (and lacks all other functionality).

    If your version of the PDF would work better, I would really prefer to use PDF, since the page layout is a little clearer. I created an account under eric.torstenson@gmail.com

    Thanks,

    eric torstenson
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  • EMPLOYEE
    Rachel James (Web Producer) March 16, 2011 15:49
    Hi Eric,

    I'm glad to hear that the ePub is working better. We're going to work with Google to make sure that they're providing the appropriate files and to see what can be done to improve that experience.

    I've added the ebook bundle to your account, so you can now download the files from Your Products page. These files are DRM-free, so you can use any PDF-reader to read the PDF. You can find more information about our ebooks here.

    Also, here's the zip of the example files, and you can find more resources on the author's website.

    Thanks for working through this with us. I hope that you'll be pleased with this book.

    Regards,

    Rachel James
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  • I’m thankful
    eric.torstenson March 16, 2011 15:54
    Hi Rachel,

    The PDF is exactly what I was hoping for. I get a TOC, the code segments is selectable and even at a slightly reduced size, those call out boxes are perfectly readable!

    Thank you very much for getting me a good copy. Is this the usual format for books purchased through your store?
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  • EMPLOYEE
    Rachel James (Web Producer) March 16, 2011 16:10
    Hi Eric,

    I'm really glad to hear the PDF is what you were hoping for! Yes, this is our standard level of quality and nearly all of our ebooks are available as PDF.

    If you're interested, you can check out our free samplers, which are PDF excerpts from some of our books. When you're browsing book pages in our store, you'll see samplers in the Related Content section, like you see here for jQuery Cookbook.

    Here's our list of all books that are available as ebooks, more Javascript books and resources, and more Missing Manuals.

    Rachel
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