Where to buy tech e-books

I have adopted e-books in a big way. This is a quick post to register which publishers are selling tech e-books, and where. Most e-books they sell are more expensive than the Kindle versions sold at amazon.com, but are DRM-free and in several different formats such as EPUB, PDF, and MOBI. Some give lifetime e-book updates, will archive your e-books at services such as Dropbox, and give much cheaper e-book upgrades for print books.

• Apress

  Sells its own e-books and those from Springer.

• InformIT

  Sells its own e-books and those from Addison-Wesley Professional, Cisco Press, FT Press, IBM Press, Pearson IT Certification, Pearson Prentice Hall, Prentice Hall Professional, Que, Sams, and VMware Press.

• O’Reilly

  Sells its own e-books and those from Academic Press, Elsevier, Microsoft Press, Morgan Kaufmann, Sybex, Wiley, Wrox, and others. They also provide the Safari Books Online subscription service.

• Packt Publishing

  Popular for publishing books for open source software.

• Wiley

  Text e-Books are in PDF and EPUB formats and use the Adobe DRM. I bought my first e-book there but wasn’t able to download it and was shown a “Territory Not Authorized” message instead. At times like these I wonder who exactly is served by DRM. Definitely not the customers. The problem was eventually resolved and I was able to download the book in EPUB format.

• Wrox

  Professional e-books in PDF, EPUB and Kinlde (PRC) format.

I have intentionally left some sources out because they have a confusing online presence and are not known for selling e-books, like McGraw-Hill Professional. Not surprisingly, most of them are college text book publishers. Most book publishers for professionals have adopted e-books in a big way, and mostly offer e-books without DRM.