This could finally ... f-i-n-a-l-l-y ... be the year of the eBook. It's been a long time coming. The technology to make it happen has been here for years but there was a chicken and egg situation where people weren't buying and so publishers weren't providing them which made it unattractive for people to buy ...

Things are changing so fast that it's difficult to put a precise figure on it, but it seems that most of the publishers ... and a few non publishers ... are now offering their technical books as eBooks. But since this is something new, everyone is doing it just a little bit differently.

APress, for example, offers specific eBooks as PDF files. They're taking a risk because once they send out a PDF, they can't control distribution and have no guarantee that they'll get paid for additional copies. This is why Microsoft is now locking up software!

Here's some current APress offerings that you can purchase for a pittance.

• Obfuscating .NET:
• Regular Expressions with .NET
• Visual Basic.NET or C# Which to Choose?
• NT/2000 Security Programming with VB

Most companies, however, are going with a "subscription" kind of service to give them some kind of guarantee of being paid for their books.

Wrox offers a subscription they call WroxBase. According to their web page, Wroxbase lets subscribers have online access to Wrox Press books. And it also lets them add private bookmarks and notes and a variety of extra-value search and comment features.

O'Reilly goes one better and has created Safari - a subscription service to their books and books from other publishers too. Safari lets subscribers search more than a thousand books in their technical library or read books from cover-to-cover. Over a dozen publishers work with them, including the mega-site InformIT.

Books24x7.com is an independent company offering a similar service: full electronic versions of top technical books plus complete search capabilities.

The big book retailers, Amazon.COM and Barnes and Noble, both have collections of "reader based" ebooks. "Reader based" means that you use either the Microsoft or Adobe reading software to read the book. This prevents the book from being copied (in addition to offering some convenience factors for the reader). So far, titles in this format are limited.

They also offer very specialized topics in PDF format for big bucks. Here, the eBook allows books to be distributed to a much smaller market that would normally not be able to justify the publishing process. As an example, Amazon is offering a market study by the consulting company, the Sageza Group: The New Religion: Linux and Open Source for almost $300.

Twin Releases for VB.NET and C#

What's the difference between VB.NET and C#? Not that much! Dan Appleman has written a book about it. (The book is available as an eBook - see Trend Number 1 - at his Boutique Technology Publisher web site - see Trend Number 4.) So a lot of publishers and authors have realized that they can get a two for one deal by writing essentially the same book for both VB.NET and C#. The Twin Releases in the this Guide are all marked so you can pick them out easily! Check out the Twin Release book reviews here.

Buy a book AND a relationship

Some of the best technical publishers (and some individuals) are sponsoring web sites that provide great support and information based on the books. The two leaders are:

• Wrox

You can get lost just browsing the web sites offered by Wrox in support of their books.

• O'Reilly

O'Reilly is the activist web site and not only supports their books, but they also get involved in things like patent rights, open source software, and other issues important to programmers. It's mainly because that's the kind of guy Tim O'Reilly is.

A lot of the books reviewed here have web sites that support them, but Karl Moore's is possibly the most ambitious ... and the most VB centered. Check out:

• VB-World (Karl Moore)

Boutique Technology Publishers

This isn't really a new trend. (OK ... so I lied. So shoot me.) But it is an important element of electronic publishing that keeps renewing itself. Small, specialized publishers have been with us since Gutenberg. But today, they're STILL popping up with increasing frequency and some of the best publishers today weren't in existance just a few years ago. O'Reilly started that way originally and they are certainly one of the majors today.

This collection also includes a lot of books from APress (the Authors Press) which was formed because Dan Appleman and Gary Cornell got tired of dealing with the existing big publishers. And another publisher, No Starch Press, has already sort of "budded off the side" of APress.

This is important for us as technical book consumers because, in general, these people are in the business because they love it ... not just because they've been book publishers for a long time. They do really good work!