ASP.NET

We have been gradually making improvements to the Wrox.com ebook selection over the last 1-2 years. Today, we're announcing that all Wrox ebooks purchased at Wrox.com are now DRM-free AND available for download in the 3 major formats -  PDF, Mobi, EPub.

I'm happy to tell you that we have begun rolling out Wrox DRM-free ebooks on Wrox.com in both PDF and ePub. And, now, as of January 2012, these include mobi files as well. And for books where we offer all 3 versions versions, you'll automatically get the PDF and the ePUB AND mobi in your download. Initially, we have the following list of more than 50 recent and top-selling Wrox ebooks we're offering the combination format download on. When you pay for the PDF on these, you'll get the ePUB and mobi as well.

In addition to the 247 Wrox books that Safari now has in the Safari Online Books subscription, Safari has also now added the videos to go with 12 of our 24-Hour Trainer books. So, if you have a Safari library subscription, you should now be able to read these books as well as watch the hours of accompanying video lessons for each.

I'm very happy to acknowledge what several authors and readers have noticed: Wrox ebooks are now available for purchase from oreilly.com. O'Reilly has built a tremendous retail web site over the years selling many other publisher's books that programmers would look for including Manning, Pragmatic, as well as their own books. We're happy that our readers can now buy our ebooks there as well.

As we announced recently, Wrox books are now in Safari. Already, the good folks at Safari have added 218 full Wrox books in Safari and they're adding more constantly.

For the month of May, Wrox marketing has passed along the good news from Safari that we're authorized to offer you this great new offer to join Safari at a discount:

I really wish I could read Italian so I could accurately translate this myself. But thanks to the built in language translator at the bottom of the page, I know we've been chosen by a blogger at http://blogs.dotnethell.it/ciupaz/IT-Book-of-the-Year-2010__16993.aspx with not one but two of their top 5 IT books of the year.

At #3, Beginning ASP.NET 4 by Imar Spaanjaars.

If you’ve been following my blog since February, you know that we started then with 24 Wrox ebooks that we began selling as DRM-free PDFs (PDFs with no digital rights management). We’ve listened to a lot of feedback about our DRM-free PDF ebooks this year and are happy to announce two really big permanent steps for Wrox ebooks.

There's a big continuing discussion about how much ebooks should cost and we continue to listen and learn. Beyond the price question though, what's more interesting to me is what ebooks can do that print books can't. Of course, searchability, portability, many other ebook features are well known. But adding value to ebooks is an important focus for us.

Thanks to Wrox author Barry Dorrans (Beginning ASP.NET Security) for inspiring this quick post. I've taken a few screen grabs here to show everyone who asks what our books look like on a Kindle. These were captured on a Kindle 3. The captures are from Bill Evjen, Scott Hanselman, and Devin Rader's Professional ASP.NET 4.0.

As usual, when there's a big list of conference announcements, there's a big list of Wrox authors speaking at them. We're lucky to get to work with such busy and active authors, here are a few of the highlights on the speaking schedule in 2010: