After having experienced the Thout reader version of the 1st edition of this book,
I cannot even imagine going back to the funny pdf 'e-book' again.

Please if you could let us all know when the Thout version is available.

There is NO way I'm buying anything else and I believe there's tons of us out there :)
- I'd even rather go straight for db4o or Ozone than study Hibernate from a pdf e-book :)

Thanks a bunch!

Interesting. The reason why I contacted Manning a few years ago as a publisher for Hibernate in Action was because they handed out plain PDFs as ebooks.

But you can certainly ask Manning if they will give you a more restrictive DRMed format that you will be unable to open in a few years -> http://www.manning.com/

Just don't expect others to share your opinion about this :)

Is this title available for the Sony eReader?

Thanks,
Scott

Guys, it's a PDF. You can read it anywhere.

Do all others a favor and don't give publishers the idea that DRMed, proprietary, and completely closed formats are a good thing. Even I as an author don't want that.

So now you suggest I might be representing the greedy publishers, hah? :) Well, maybe I am (just kidding;)

My point was, the Thout e-book is a REAL usability breakthrough in what can finally now be called e-books, and I'm NOT kidding. You can make your own annotations, highlights, remarks, bookmarks, full-text search the aforementioned(!), have private and community on-line shared part of them (and all that without leaving the reader!). It renders the pages nicely on any screen size and any device supporting Java. I can use my favorite super-sharp 1:1 fonts instead of the fuzzy pdf antialiased 'miracle' - well I know I can switch to this in pdf as well, but only ending up looking at weird unnatural pdf fonts instead of th nice system ones). PDF when used for e-books just falls short in every single thing. Yes, it's ubiquitous but so is Java and thus Thout Reader (dotReader very soon)! And BTW even if the book is DRM'd, it doesnt prevent me from printing or copying parts of the contents and pasting it into say Wordpad which is so annoying in protected pdf files...

I can see that some more points need to be explained:

- First, when you buy an e-book at Mannings, you are always getting it BOTH in PDF and Thout Reader format (when available)

- Second, the Thout Reader is open-source, as is Java (now), and the format will be suporrted for many years to come - the successor of Thout Reader is backward compatible and it's gonna always support the older, Thout format (visit dotReader.com - don't get scared by the name, it's still in Java;)

- BTW, even if it was readable, say, only like 3 years from now, who cares about old tech books anyway? 3 yrs in Java and/or Hibernate are like 15 yrs in some other fields :)

- And last, but not least - DRMs or not - don't you think that book authors should get paid for their work if you like it and if it makes a big difference in your productivity? This book (the first issue, for sure) is such a buddy. Why to steal it then?

Mannings ebooks are not "protected" PDFs, AFAIK. They have a license stamp at the bottom of each page. So you can copy and paste code snippets from the book, you can also print it if you want.

I agree that the usability of the PDF readers (note the plural here) can be an issue. I personally use Acrobat (not the Reader) most of the time and I can do almost all the things you list as features of ThoughtReader.

I don't have a ThoughtReader version and I can't make one, http://www.manning.com/ can.