ebook

iBook / Nook? What really?

Duncan Epping · Jan 24, 2012 ·

It took us a while to figure this one out, but finally we managed to create a proper epub version of our book. Converting from Kindle to iBooks / Nook is not easy, but after using multiple tools and manually editing the book using Sigil we managed to create version which was submitted to the iBooks store and Barnes & Nobles a couple of weeks ago. This morning I noticed that the book has been made available. So for all those who have been asking about it, here are the links:

We hope you will enjoy it!

Crazy Black Friday / Cyber Monday deal!

Duncan Epping · Nov 25, 2011 ·

I know there are a lot of crazy deals on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but this is most definitely the deal of the year for all virtualization fanatics! I just changed the price of the vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive to $ 4.99 and 3.99 for my European friends. Yes that is correct…. Less than 5 dollars for over 350 pages of deepdive material. Keep in mind that this is a limited offer, Tuesday the 29th the price will be back to “normal” again.

Pick it up, tell your friends / colleagues / family about it… Here are some snippets from Amazon reviews, but with 15 extremely positive reviews, all of them 5 out of 5, you know you can’t go wrong:

“If you’re serious about VMware virtualization this book is a must have. Regardless of you responsibilities with a virtual infrastructure administrative, or from a architecture design stand point this book is for you. The level of knowledge and depth which Frank and Duncan cover in this book about the new clustering changes in vSphere 5 is priceless. The design tips and illustrations through the book are truly invaluable. There is no other book that gets into the core of all the different vSphere 5 cluster technologies like this one, ”

“Whether you are longing to know about the transition from AAM to FDM, best practices for DRS and DPM, or are just curious to know what those acronyms are this is a great book! The technical detail, practical advice, and comparative analysis throughout make this book one of the most thorough yet concise technical books available.”

“The book is clearly written, a special emphasis has been made on making it understandable even for professionals like me who use vSphere daily yet do not manage huge production environments. The book goes to great lengths to explain all possible scenarios and I found answers to all my questions. Not only sections cover HOW the technology works, but the authors go as far as explaining the way the algorithms are working, which will satisfy the curiosity of everyone.”

“The complete explanations provide the reader all of the information needed to make informed decisions about their environment with excellent diagrams to provide strong visual reinforcements.”

** Please note that Amazon charges for remote downloads, so the price listed here is “local” download price without the additional Amazon transfer costs **

Cool feature for Kindle users

Duncan Epping · Apr 7, 2011 ·

I was lurking around the Kindle website to figure out how to enable “Public Notes” as I would love to read comments on our book and figure out how we can improve the content. Some of the things that we wrote make a lot of sense to us but might not make a lot of sense to you. I encourage everyone to take the following steps and enable public notes on the books you own. I have enabled mine for the following books that I recently bought for the Kindle. Here are the steps required to enable it:

Login to https://kindle.amazon.com/ with your Amazon account
Click on “Your Books”
Tick the “Public Notes: Make yours public” tickbox

It is as simple as that. I have just bought our book so that I can read your public notes, so take it away! I started reading the vSphere Design book this week and I have added some notes already. I will try to make notes for books each book I buy / read and share them with you and hope all of you will do the same.

What? An ebook? Is this a late April Fools’ joke?

Duncan Epping · Apr 5, 2011 ·

No it isn’t a late April Fools’ joke… And we never expected this to actually happen to be honest. Last week I had discussion about the ebook on twitter and people were convinced that ebooks are the way to go. I won’t deny that and I know Frank agrees with me on this as well but the fact of the matter is that we just didn’t have the time to do all the reformatting work. I asked once again on twitter if someone knew any tools that we could leverage or if someone could give us a hand. The last 4 times I asked this question no one responded and again hardly anyone did, however a close relative of mine did contact me and told me he had some tools that could possibly help us. I forwarded the PDF and the DOCX file and within a couple of hours I received an almost clean .html file back. The email also contained a very important tip, Mobipocket Creator. So I installed it and added the html file to it and clicked “Convert”….

Yes it was close, but not close enough to be published yet. I shared the book with Frank and both of us opened it up in our Kindle App and reviewed the layout. We marked all the pages that had some glitches and started editing those. We expected to be done in a couple of hours but it ended up being a full day again for both of us… but who cares the result is worth it.

After doing research on the Kindle Store we had another decision to make; pricing. We noticed that some ebooks are more expensive than the paper version, WHAT? We didn’t want to do that. We never expected to release this and every copy sold is an extra copy sold of our book and we know that many who wanted the ebook bought the paper version instead so we decided to make it cheap, almost half the price of the cheapest vSphere book on the list (calling all publishers, revisit your pricing strategy!) and $ 17.45 less than the paper version.

But before we give you the link, one of the most asked questions… Why Kindle? Well Kindle happens to be a multi-platform solution. The Kindle Application is available for Mac, Windows, iPad, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone 7. Which made us believe that if we had to pick one format Kindle was the way to go.

So without further ado we present: vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS technical deepdive, the ebook…… for only $ 7.50. Pick it up,

Frank & Duncan
ps: it is also available in the UK Kindle Store for £5.36.