Paperback now available

It took me longer than expected, but I managed to edit the book for a paperback version. Mostly that involved taking out a lot of the links -- useful in an e-book, pretty worthless in a paperback. The new version is now available on Amazon here.

The big advantage to the paperback format is that you get a "real" book to read, annotate, dog-ear, or whatever. I'll probably always have a personal preference for this form even if I can see value in e-books. You also get a really great cover courtesy of The Passion of the Nerd, to whom I'm very grateful for this and other reasons. Go watch his videos (here or here) -- they're really good.

As I said, the big change is that I took out lots of the links. If, for example, you don't know who Sherlock Holmes was, you'll have to look him up rather than click on a handy link. I honestly don't think that's much of a disadvantage, but it could be in some cases. If you find you want those links, feel free to buy both versions. :)

Another benefit of the e-book is that it's easy to update. You can get an updated version for free by asking Amazon for it. Be warned that downloading the updated version will cause you to lose any bookmarks or annotations. That may become a non-issue if you annotate the paperback.

I've made updates fairly regularly since I first published the e-book, and in fact made a few more changes while I was fixing the text for paperback. The changes are pretty small at this point; I doubt you'd notice unless you read obsessively or tried to access a broken link. The fact that the changes are now so rare made me think that a paperback would work. Still, I may make changes in the future and the e-book will always be easier and cheaper to work with. 

That brings me to the final point, namely cost. The way these self-published books work is that Amazon prints each one as it's ordered. There's a minimum cost, below which I can't price the book. The actual price is a bit above that, but not much.