Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Books' PDF Update; October Talks in Germany

It's hard to believe it's been nearly six months since I first wrote about the
forthcoming availability of my books in electronic form. We've done a lot of
work since then, and the PDFs are nearly completed. Initial availability is
expected to be next month. We've largely hewed to the plan I posted in October,
but we did make one major change: the PDFs will use no DRM. Instead, we'll
rely on "personalization" technology that adds purchaser information (e.g.,
their name) to the PDFs when they are purchased. Presumably, this will
discourage people from posting their PDFs on the Internet.

The lack of DRM means you can put copies of the PDFs you buy on all your
machines, you can annotate and print them to your heart's content, you can
access them through desktop search tools, etc. In other words, you can
literally (and legally) do pretty much all the things with your PDF copies of my
books that I can, as long as the result is for your personal use. I've attached
a marketing flyer that gives more information about the electronic versions of
my books and also gives an email address to write to if you'd like to be
notified when they become available.

* * * * *

For the tenth year in a row, I'll be presenting a series of technical seminars
in Europe in the fall. This year all the talks will be in Stuttgart, and one of
the highlights will be my recently-developed two-day course on making effective
use of C++ in embedded systems. You can find links to all the seminars at my
Upcoming Talks page, http://www.aristeia.com/seminars.html .

Thanks for your continuing interest in my work.

Scott