2010-03-04 18:48:20
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. 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, now keep a look out for Cisco books from competitors. If you have some favorite Cisco books that are not from CiscoPress please tell me as I am now extremely interested.