Now that I’ve got access to a Kindle, articles like this one are catching my eye: Starting next month, O’Reilly (publishers of technology-oriented books) will make select titles available in digital e-book bundles. While you may not care about picking up the latest edition of Perl in a Nutshell or Unix Power Tools in digital format, this is still worth mentioning because, rather than picking one format and then requiring customers to tether themselves to a device that supports that format, O’Reilly is providing readers a choice to go with PDF, a Kindle-compatible format, a Sony-compatible format, or all of the above. Or you can buy the good ol’ fashioned print edition, same as always.

O’Reilly’s doing a couple of other nice things, too: One, if you buy a PDF book now (the only format they currently support) they’ll give you the bundle when it’s available next month. Two, they’re trusting their customers and not placing digital rights management, or DRM, on the downloaded books. DRM is common with purchased music and video files and is designed to keep people from illegally sharing them, but more often than not causes undue headaches to honest customers.

Anyway, if there’s something for us all to take away from this it’s to think about ways to give consumers–whether they be programmers, teachers, or students–options as to how they may access and use your content.

Tags: kindle, pdf, publishing