Warescription eBook Formats

The Warescription program, at this time, publishes its books in three formats: PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/Mobipocket (hereafter referred to simply as "Kindle").

The PDF format is the primary format, in that it is the one that will be of the highest quality. The PDF is not reflowable (at least, not that we are aware of), so it is designed to be used on devices where you can read a full page at a time. The PDFs are identical to the print editions, except that the PDFs are in color, where as the print editions are monochrome.

The EPUB format was added to the Warescription lineup in January 2010. If you have a device that cannot read PDF but can read EPUB, or it can read PDF but the Warescription PDFs are unsuitable, try the EPUB edition. Note that this format is a bit of a work-in-progress, and how well it looks will vary widely by device. The benchmark for a quality EPUB viewer is the Bookworm online viewer from O'Reilly and Associates. Hence, right now, with no dominant EPUB reader on the market, if Bookworm displays the book correctly, that will be considered "ok", though we will attempt to improve the EPUBs to work better on other readers as well. On the Android platform, at the time of this writing, the Aldiko reader is the best for viewing Warescription content, though better options may emerge over time.

The Kindle format, frankly, stinks. It does not support monospace fonts, so all of the code listings have to be converted into thin slices of JPEG file. This means the code listings do not honor Kindle font size selection and look lousy to boot. Also, it takes a lot of processing power to personalize the Kindle books for the subscribers, meaning releasing a new edition ties up our server for ~24 hours. Furthermore, there are very few devices for which the Kindle format is required — most devices in use today support either PDF or EPUB as alternatives. The expectation is that the Kindle format will be dropped from the Warescription lineup in 2011.

If, while using the Warescription books, you can think of ways to improve how they are displayed on your device, feel free to let us know. In particular, if you run into nasty formatting problems, please provide a screenshot or digital photo of the problem, so we can see it, and let us know the specific device or software that is rendering it poorly.