SaveYourself.ca • Sensible advice for aches, pains & injuries
“I hate reading things on a computer.”
This is the number one concern I hear from my customers. By far. You want to print the tutorial, or you want to read it on a portable device — an iPad or a Kindle, say. Anything but your desktop computer! This document explains your technological options, and provides links to more instructions for specifics.
My tutorials are lovingly hand-crafted to be superior to regular ebooks in many ways. In particular, there are no restrictions on your usage, and they are well-built and adaptable to nearly any reading technology. If you’re curious, please read my rather passionate rant about what’s wrong with the ebook industry, and how I’m making a better product for my customers.
The tutorials are designed to be interactive. The best place to read them is “live” and online. They have features that are only available live, such as footnotes that pop up. And the live version is always up-to-date, of course. Bear in mind that you lose some of these benefits when you print or save the document or convert it into some other format.
Now, on with the reading options …
Hands down, the best reading experience for my books is on Apple’s lovely iPad (yes, I have one): you can sit in your favourite chair and still have all the great “live” features of the book. It looks great and works great. There’s zero setup. Just go to your email on the iPad and tap on the access link that you received after purchase. “And boom, there you go,” as Steve Jobs would say. (There are also several other good ways to use an iPad to read my books1 — iPads are highly adaptable.)
Like an iPad, a laptop or netbook is a computer that gives you access to every feature of the “live” book online. And you can take it anywhere. But many people don’t care for reading on any computer screen, of course.
The Kindle is almost perfect for reading: lighter than the iPad, a crisp e-ink (electronic paper) display that looks more like paper. But there’s a catch: it’s a bit tricky getting started. Not exactly hard, but not exactly one-click easy either. Instructions.
Works on Kindle. With a little work…
Works on Kindle. With a little work…
Paper is so simple and nice. I don’t have to tell you why paper is good.
But let me tell you why it is bad. The book does not print beautifully. I have no control over this. Every kind of internet web browsing program handles printing differently … and most of them not particularly well. It may not paginate well. Images may be cut in half or lost entirely. Formatting may be ugly. My longest books will use a lot of ink and paper.
And of course links and footnotes won’t work at all.
But paper is nice!
Any large-screened smart phone is a half-decent choice for reading my books. They are better for reading than you might think: I read a great deal on my iPhone before I got an iPad. The sacrifice is obvious, though: the screen is small, and the formatting can be a bit wonky in places due to being squished into that small space. But mostly it’s fine. It’s just not as nice.
The books are web pages, and they can be saved. This is mainly a method of preserving the document, so that you can use it long after your subscription has expired. But saving them also leads to other ways to read them. For instance, you might save the book as an ePUB file, which would then allow you to read it in your favourite e-reader, such as Stanza or iBooks.
Regardless of file type, saving the book always has one major advantage (you get to keep it forever), and one major problem (it doesn’t get updated like the live version).
There are so many choices and combinations of options that I cannot even begin to cover them all here. I will discuss three popular file types: PDF, ePUB and webarchive. What you do with them is up to you!
It’s easy to save a tutorial as a “web archive” file, which is like a snapshot of a webpage. When you open a web page, you are downloading not only the content, but a lot of other information about how the content should look and work. All of that stuff can be saved into a single file that can be opened and used later without an internet connection. So a web archive file is basically just like any webpage, except that it is stored on your computer instead of the internet.
A web archive file will preserve your tutorial purchase indefinitely, while preserving the functionality of the live document. See instructions.
The publishing industry will be happy to leave PDFs behind. They are hard to update, glitchy and unreliable, difficult for beginners to use, and worse. And as products like the Kindle and iPad soar in popularity, PDFs are finally on the way out.
But they aren’t gone yet! PDFs are still what many people think an ebook is — an ebook is a PDF download. Not here. I do not provide PDFs, and I won’t be starting.
However, you can easily make a PDF. It’s really easy on a Mac, and non-hard using Windows. See PDF instructions.
is coming soon!
ePUB is the future, and Amazon has infamously refused to handle ePUBS on the Kindle. However, most modern ebooks are ePUBS now — some flavour of ePUB. I do not yet provide ePUB versions of my books, but I will. It’s just a matter of time. My apologies for the wait.
That said, ePUBs still lack many of the advantages of the format I offer now — in particular, they cannot be updated nearly as easily as a webpage, and ePUB versions will inevitably get a little behind my live web versions.
