Who Loves PDF Books? We Do — Again!

You’ve spoken, and we’ve listened: we’re bringing back the PDF format for all single books you purchase from us! See how we plan to do this, and more. By Matt Derrick.

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I’ve only been CEO of Razeware for a short amount of time, but it didn’t take me long to discover that there were some longtime devoted customers that were very upset about one thing: we didn’t allow PDF downloads of single books you’ve purchased.

It’s not quite to the level of Netflix CEO’s memorable “I screwed up“. And to be honest, at the time there were some reasons for making that change; we were switching to a subscription-based platform, we were trying to find good ways to tackle piracy of our books without tacking on DRM, along with other issues. But it’s clear to me that we missed the mark a bit by deciding to deprecate PDFs.

At the end of the day, we want you to be able to consume books in the method of your choosing, and so that’s why we are bringing back downloadable PDFs for single books you’ve purchased!

When Will PDF Versions Be Available?

As you can imagine, we haven’t created PDFs of books since last year, so this isn’t a switch that we can flip overnight. However, we are targeting the first books to come out in PDF format starting today, April 28th, beginning with Android Apprentice, Fourth Edition.

We’re planning to roll out the remainder of our book catalog in PDF format throughout May and June of this year, including your favorite titles like Real-World Android by Tutorials, SwiftUI by Tutorials, Server-Side Swift with Vapor, Dart Apprentice, and more!

Where Can the PDF Version be Found?

This means if you’ve bought a single book recently that only came in ePUB format, over the next few months we’ll be backfilling as many books as we can with PDF versions. And going forward, we’ll release all new single books you purchase in both ePUB and PDF format.

You’ll be able to access the ePUB and PDF versions of single books you’ve purchased by going to the main book page, and clicking the “Access other versions and formats” link. As the PDF versions go up, we’ll email all book owners to let them know that their book now has PDF access restored.

Where to Go From Here?

We hope that you’re looking forward to the return of PDFs — and we’re glad that we’re now in a position to make them a regular part of our published books.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight our book and operations teams that not only are keeping the myriad of book projects on track moving forward, but are also double-timing their efforts so that we can get all of these books published in PDF format for you. Manda Frederick, Edith Hermann, Kerry Belanger, Andrea Lepley, and more deserve a special shoutout for this. What. A. Team!

But beyond our internal team, I’d like to thank those of you that took the time to bring this to our attention. We will only succeed as a company, as long as our community succeeds — so this is not only a win for you, this is a win for us. Thanks for your continued support!