Free Microsoft Press Titles Now Available on Kindle, Other eBook Readers

Microsoft Press makes various titles available for free in PDF format (see this blog post from March), but this week it revealed that it is now making some of these titles available for free via the Amazon Kindle and other eBook platforms as well, thanks to their release in DRM-free EPUB and MOBI formats.

But there's another advantage to these new formats, compared to PDF. As Phil Cross notes on a Microsoft UK Student blog, these document formats support document reflow, "meaning that it recomposes depending on the width of the screen (or as you resize a Window)."

That's huge. You can read PDF files easily enough, on a PC, iPad, or whatever. But they're essentially bitmaps in that they do not reflow in any way, you can only enlarge or shrink the entire page at once. They're not intelligent.

Cross has links to the EPUB and MOBI versions of the following free books: Charles Petzold’s Programming Windows Phone 7, Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 by Patrice Pelland, Pascal Paré, and Ken Haines, Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 by Ross Mistry and Stacia Misner, Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2 by Charlie Russel and Craig Zacker, and Katherine Murray’s Own Your Future, Update Your Skills with Resources and Career Ideas from Microsoft. Check it out!