Adam and Tonya Engst and the gang at TidBITS have been doing a great job publishing Take Control electronic books for more than a year. Now another legendary Macintosh name, Dave Mark, is taking the e-book plunge. SpiderWorks is a new e-book imprint that's focused on Mac programming topics, at least initially. The first e-books from SpiderWorks include brand new updates of two classics, Danny Goodman's AppleScript Handbook and Dave Mark's Learn C on the Macintosh. That's a very impressive start.
Although the first SpiderWorks books are developer-focused, the site says that non-developer books are on the way. SpiderWorks books are presented in a horizontal "landscape" format, created by Mac author Robin Williams, that's designed to take advantage of today's wide screens.
SpiderWorks books arrive as PDF files that are not copy protected, although they employ a gentle form of "social copy protection". When you buy a SpiderWorks e-book, your name is encrypted and placed in the PDF as a digital watermark. You can't see the watermark, and you can copy the document freely, but if a copy gets loose in the wild, SpiderWorks says they can use the watermark to find out where the copy came from.
You can download free preview chapters to get a taste for the books. Good luck to Dave Mark and the gang at SpiderWorks in their new venture!
(Disclaimer: everybody mentioned in this post is a friend. But please check out the great stuff at SpiderWorks and Take Control anyway -- both provide free samples.)
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