Stefan Arentz

It’s been a while since i really wrote an article on my blog so I thought it would be a good idea to write a more serious piece: my experience with buying e-books and the quality of those files.

The publishers that I will cover are: Manning, APress, O’Reilly and The Pragmatic Programmers. The tone of this article is pretty negative already but that is simply to indicate that my overall experience with e-books is not very positive.

Today I’m covering Manning. Unfortunately not one of the best experiences.

Manning provides two kinds of books; books that are work in progress and e-book versions of the finished titles that you can find in the bookstore. Their program for the books in progress is called Manning Early Access Program or MEAP for short. I’ve bought both kind of books from them so I’ll cover them both.

Manning MEAP

Currently I’m reading the new Java Persistence with Hibernate that I got through the MEAP program. I bought a copy about two weeks ago. Unfortunately the whole MEAP experience is pretty bad in general.

First of all Manning seems to continually switch between payment providers and this time my order was processed through the Yahoo store. Manning also has outsourced their shopping cart to Yahoo. Paying went smooth and I could use my PayPal account for that.

After completing the payment I got an email with an order overview within a couple of minutes. In the old Manning store you would only get a message saying ‘Thank you for your payment of $22.50 for Manning.com order #12345′ without even mentioning the title of the book or including an invoice. So that is an improvement.

So far so good, so I can now download the book. Well, not really. This is the really confusing part of MEAP. I was not presented with a download link or any instructions in the email or on the screen. Very confusing.

Then I remembered that there also was a member area where you can login. So I went to the Manning home page hoping to find a login link. Nothing. It simply does not mention this member area. I finally found an old email that pointed me to http://www.manning.com/account, a page that is nowhere linked to on the Manning site itself. I logged in and then realized that while buying that MEAP title I was never asked for my Manning account information. Even more confusing. And in my account there was of course no mention of the book I just bought. Even though there are two pages titled ‘Download MEAP and e-books Now!’ and ‘Previous Order Receipts’ no mention of the book I had bought was there. Only titles that I bought earlier this year and last year were present. What a mess.

So I send an email to support@manning.com which is the reply-to address in the order confirmation email that I got. That message was from september 17th and as of today I have not received an answer. Bad.

Then something unexpected happened. I got a whole bunch of emails from Manning titled ‘Manning e-book delivery’. Each of these emails had a download link for a chapter of the book I ordered. Joy! Well at least I could download these now. On the 17th, the same day as the order, only the first four chapters were available and I successfully downloaded them.

These early access PDFs are all without password protection and are printable and copying text is allowed. There is a little ‘Licensed to Stefan’ caption on the bottom so I guess that is why it took a while for the PDFs to become available.

On the 22nd of September I received emails with download links for chapters 7 till 10. Unfortunately because I was occupied with other things I did not see those emails until after the completely silly 48 hour download period had expired. The (non working) download links point to a Yahoo download area so it looks like the have outsourced that part too.

Again I emailed support@manning.com to request that these chapters are made available to me again. Today the 2nd of october I have not received one single answer from Manning Support so I can still not read the book that I paid for. What really annoys me is that Manning does not even send an automatic reply back with the standard “Thank you for contacting Manning. We’ll make sure you get a proper answer within X days” or so. Maybe they are all on holiday, I don’t know.

So in the end Manning MEAP has been a really bad experience for me. They seem to have outsourced most of their core process to a third party and that is probably why MEAP is not properly integrated and why they have no control over it. Not in their back-office and not in the protected user area.

Manning E-Book Editions

So much for MEAP. What about the normal e-books that they sell?

I have bought a whole bunch there, the last being “POJOs in Action” in April this year. That was when they still had their own order system I think. Although they have some good new titles I am hesitant to buy anything from Manning at the moment because of my MEAP experience so I cannot comment on the current state of their regular e-book shop. All I can tell you about is my past experience. I noticed two more serious issues with the Manning back office.

Although the name of this site is secure.manning.com it really is an unsecured area without HTTP/SSL.

And also here all the book download links are expired and there is no option to regenerate the PDF. I contacted Manning on April 18th this year about an expired download link for ‘IntelliJ in Action’ and I have not received an answer back from them since. That is more than 5 months ago now. Customer service seems to be non-existent at Manning.

On a positive note I can tell you that the quality of the PDFs that I bought earlier is ok. The PDFs are not password protected, are printable, have a properly linked index that matches the page numbers and it is possible to copy text from the PDF. The only small annoyance is that there is a lot of white space around the page. Large margins. I’m sure it makes sense for the printing process but I always end up cropping the PDF manually with Apple’s Preview.app so that more fits on the screen at a lower zoom level.

Computer screens are not ideal for PDFs and I wish e-book publishers would at least recognize that and produce e-books in formats that match screens sizes better. For example I would love to have wide-screen versions of books so that I can at least put one whole page on the screen without having to scroll or zoom out.

Conclusion

My Manning experience is pretty bad. So bad that I am simply not going to buy anything from their online store anymore. They simply don’t seem to have grip on their e-business. I can understand that it is difficult to have a good and solid PDF pipeline but there is no excuse for ignoring all the support emails. At least that would make up for the broken back-office they have. There are so many mistakes and annoyances in the whole process that it feels very amateurish.

Later this week I’ll write about my experience with APress.