For those programmer-types out there, O'Reilly's Japanese e-book store lets you purchase and download the Japanese versions of their books in PDF format even if you're not in Japan. The customer agreement says you have to be in the country to use the store, but nothing on O'Reilly's site seems to enforce it.

I just bought プログラミング言語Ruby, because (1) I want to learn Ruby, and (2) I'm apparently a masochist.

The greatest part of O'Reilly is that all their ebooks are DRM free. If all publishers were like them, ebooks sales would explode and libraries would join us in the 21st century. Unfortunately, with our antiquated, pre-digital copyright laws, publishers have succeeded at amputating Google books and eviscerating every other ambitious Internet-based library since.

I wish they would just add them to their Safari subscription library. There are 6 non-english languages in it already.

vileru, preaching to the choir. I'm all for people being paid for their efforts, but with the vast quantity of information being produced every single day, information is quickly becoming a commodity.

The worst part is that many authors don't get paid for their efforts, academics in particular. It's rare to receive any compensation for a journal article, and, in fact, sometimes authors have to pay... yes, pay the journals... to have their articles published.

Furthermore, it's common practice for authors to forfeit their rights to publishers once they agree to have their articles appear in print (a professor of mine once could not legally upload one of her own articles to our course website). Keep in mind, the public already pays for such research, in a sense, via public grants.

It's now technologically feasible and profitable for us to affordably share our knowledge, but it hasn't happened. It is one of the great moral failings of our time, especially considering that it disproportionately hurts the most disadvantaged among us (i.e. individuals and institutions, often in developing nations, who cannot afford the overpriced subscription fees to popular journals, etc.).