This is just stupid… Peachpit Press charges the same amount for a .pdf version of a book that they charge for the print version… but if you buy both you save a whopping $3!

What kind of crack are they smoking? Guess which Flex 3 book I’m not buying?

Peachpit needs to read a page from the business practices of the Pragmatic Programmers, where they sell .pdf versions of their books for less than the print version, and are super-smart and sell you a bundle of the print book and the .pdf for only a few dollars more than just the print book. It’s a no-brainer to spend another $10 or so and get the beta .pdf now and the print version when it ships. The only pisser is that the PragProg folks don’t have any books on Flex.

However, Flexible Rails is only $20*, and it’s an awesome book. Manning seems to have this down too… their book + .pdf bundles are only a few dollars more than the print version alone.

Somebody at Pragmatic Programmers needs to thank Peachpit Press, actually. I was so annoyed to see their absurdly overpriced .pdf book that I blogged about it and went to the PragProg.com site so I could link to it… and I ended up buying three books (bundles of the print book and the .pdf) that caught my eye:

** ***

I just gladly spent ~ $200 on print and .pdf bundles. The books themselves are a majority of that… and then a little bit more for convenient, offline-accessible versions which fit on my hard drive.

Which publishers won by providing me value, creating a win-win? Yeah, not Peachpit Press.

* I bought the print and .pdf bundle of Flexible Rails today ’cause I didn’t have the print version, and another legal copy of the .pdf is totally worth $5 more.

** This is my second hard copy of Agile Web Development with Rails: Second Edition. The print version I have now is beaten up, and it was impossible not to add the .pdf version ’cause it was only $8 more.

*** Design Accessible Web Sites: 36 Keys to Creating Content for All Audiences and Platforms is a book I’ve been wanting to read since I met and talked with the author at RailsConf. (Dude knows his stuff… and is hella-cool to boot.)