I totally understand the frustration both readers and authors (I am both) would have with a sub-par experience with one of our apps; ebooks in general (and app versions in particular) are an evolving medium, and we’re just glad to have the opportunity to iterate and improve them as we go. OTOH, Readers with Kindles who want to buy O’Reilly books are faced with a much smaller selection of titles, both because the Kindle 1 (still) can’t display tables, and because Amazon doesn’t offer any way for us to update the books that someone buys with changes and corrections.

The preliminary sales data from the books-as-apps we currently offer has helped justify a larger investment in richer native mobile apps that do much more than just display ebook content on the mobile phone.

At any rate, thanks again for the feedback. We really do listen. I’ve asked my team to move these four apps to the top of the list for CSS updates and a QA check. I’d also be happy to give you complimentary access to the full “ebook bundle” for these titles — just drop me a line by email.

~Matt

Andrew: Well, I don’t know about “thoughtful and detailed”. Ranting and raving might be a more apt description. But nevertheless; I appreciate you taking the time to comment. I hadn’t read the page you reference which at least shows you are aware of some of the problems with the iPhone ebook format. I have to say though that the section that addresses the issue of code overflow,

We’ve chosen to configure our apps this way out of respect to authors who work hard to make their code well laid out and accurate in our books. Breaking code across lines willy-nilly and treating it as a normal block of text would undermine the time authors put into preparing the code.

Doesn’t quite ring true when I see examples such as the missing characters in the awk and Regex references or these horrible line breaks such this image from the ActionScript 3 Design Patterns title:

The code in this last example, in case you aren’t familiar with ActionScript, is all over the place. It certainly wouldn’t compile, and there’s no indication on how to interpret the hyphens or extra line breaks except just knowing from experience how it should be formatted and stripping them out altogether.

I’m glad to hear you have satisfied customers, but if any of those customers bought the awk/sed pocket reference they must have skipped the parts I refer to above. Or perhaps they were able to get more sense out of those squares, bullets and Ps than I did.

I’ve probably made my point ad nauseum by now. You say that you know there’s work to be done, but does that mean you are planning to do it? As I mention in the post, I’d be very happy to see you guys get this right but I think you have to go beyond embedding your books in a ebook reader meant for reading prose. Your content has different needs, and it’s up to you to address them. And if you do stay with Stanza, and thus decide you can live with the overflowing lines I suppose, I hope you’ll revise the other kind of errors that I encountered, and pointed to here.

To clarify, we don’t use PDF as the starting point for the apps. We use the same EPUB that’s available in the “ebook bundles” sold on oreilly.com and combine that with the Stanza rendering engine to build the apps. Those oreilly.com ebook bundles give you multiple DRM-free formats, which means you can read on the device and system of your choice (including Stanza on iPhone, or any other EPUB-compatible reader, such as Bookworm).

We’ve also posted info on getting the most out of our iPhone ebook apps which includes some options for dealing with code. As noted on that page, you can extract the EPUB content from the app, which is a nice fallback for getting a better look at the content.

We know there’s more work to do to make our apps the best they can be, but we also know that tens of thousands of readers from around the world are are reading these apps and finding them useful.

I’ll make sure we take a closer look at the titles you mention. Thanks again for the feedback.

Andrew Savikas
VP, Digital Initiatives
O’Reilly Media, Inc.

It’s like a movie studio taking a crappy CAM movie of their film and releasing it on Blu-Ray. They can and should do far better.

I often think that their iphone app is superior to their online safari application. Which is really dog slow, but then again this might say more about online safari.