Summer is moving along too fast this year. I haven’t read nearly as many books as I had planned but last week I finished Triptych by Karin Slaughter (a good read). After finishing the book I looked up the meaning of the word ‘triptych’ and the first definition was a 3 panel painting (which was used in the book). The second definition was a 3-hinged tablet written on in ancient times.
SAS Publishing doesn’t produce any 3-hinged tablets but we do offer our customers books in three formats: hardcopy, ebook, and CDROM. I remember when we shipped boxes of books with each new software shipment. The mountain of books became so large that we moved the
books to CDROM and to SAS system Help. Does your bookshelf look like this one?
Today the popular new format is the eBook. The publishing industry has seen growth of eBook sales outperforming hardcopy books over the past year.
Publishers are all buzzing about getting their books in ebook format. For SAS, we are moving in that direction, but carefully. ePub (the most common format used to create an ebook) doesn’t handle tables and inline equations very well. So please be patient with us as you will not find all of your favorite SAS books as an eBook just yet. But do let us know which titles you want as an eBook and also what device (or tablet) you’re using. I think there may be a diptych tablet (2 panel) but I haven’t heard of any triptych tablets. Have you?
2 Comments
Hi Jared. Thank you for your suggestion. I agree that O'Reilly.com does a great job with ebooks. Several of us in SAS Publishing have attended the O'Reilly Tools of Change conferences since it's inception and Tim O'Reilly is definitely a leader in the publishing industry - especially in the area of technology. SAS Publishing has many of our user written titles on their Safari Books Online service (also tech related material only) and have found that to be a successful experience for SAS users. I wasn't aware that the regular o'reilly.com bookstore provided the ebook services you mention. That is really awesome! We are reviewing our long term ebook strategy so your comments are great timing. We'll definitely include partners and distributing ebooks from the support.sas.com site in our mix. All the best.
Thanks for the update on SAS ebook publishing. It's funny you posted this today because I was just thinking about SAS ebooks this morning. Specifically, I would like to see SAS ebooks on http://oreilly.com/
I view Oreilly as THE expert in tech related ebook provision and distribution. The way they have it setup and their approach is awesome: DRM Free, multiple formats, and free updates to future versions of purchased books. They keep a history of what I've purchased and I am notified of book version updates.
SAS seems to have a strong history of partnering with experts rather than trying to be the expert themselves. The SAS ESRI Bridge is a good example. Why not a SAS Oreilly relationship?