At Home with John and Debbie

Google has an informal company motto, ‘Don’t be evil’. I wonder how that’s going, when there’s pressure from governments and shareholders. Privacy advocates are already doubting.

But enough of Google. Has O’Reilly Media ever done anything evil? They always seem squeaky clean, virtuous even.

Having published PDF and HTML versions of many of their books for years, this week they announced their first batch of EPUB/Mobipocket/Kindle eBooks. Like the PDFs, they’re DRM-free, and you get updates for free.

That’s not the bit I admire. What I admire is their reason for taking so long about it:

“While we would have liked to make these ebooks available sooner, we felt it was important to first contribute to building some of the tools needed for other publishers to follow our lead, such as enhancements to the open-source DocBook XSL stylesheets, which can now generate EPUB from DocBook XML source files “

Hooray for them!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 09:14 and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.