Buying e-book formats from the book-sites

[Steen_Harsted]

Hi Rstudio users,

First off - I am sorry if this is not the right forum to post this question, but I couldn't really find a better fit.

I mostly do my reading in the evening or at night before going to sleep, so I prefer reading paper-books or e-reader books over reading on a webpage, and I don't mind paying for a paper or e-book version of what I am reading. However, I feel as if everything inside the R and especially the tidyverse moves so fast that any "static" text containing code quickly become outdated or obsolete.

E.g. the printed version of " R Packages: Organize, Test, Document, and Share Your Code" by Hadley Wickham is from 2015. I've been reading it on the book-site (http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/), and I love the book, but a 4-year-old version of tidyverse R code seems ancient to me. I might be wrong, but I expect many things have changed in this time.

I have noticed that many of the online book sites for R books contain updated code.

Would it be possible to add an option to buy the book from the book site in an updated e-book format?

Or has someone else found a way to read updated books on an e-reader?

Cheers,

[mishabalyasin]

Would it be possible to add an option to buy the book from the book site in an updated e-book format?

I don't think so. It is mostly up to publishers, so they will probably do so only when/if there is new edition happening. For example, for "Advanced R" second edition is on the way, so once it's released, it'll most likely have an updated version of e-book.

But specifically for "R packages" I would say that what is there is rather "static" as you say. Yes, code here and there needs to be updated, but for the most part recommendations it provides are as relevant today as they were 4 years ago. Maybe one thing that for sure requires an update is to use usethis package for most tasks, but for now you can look at documentation for the package and get 90% of the benefit today without waiting for the second edition of the book.

Finally, maybe there is bookdown -> e-book converter somewhere? I never actually bothered to find one since I prefer to read it from the site anyway, but it sounds like something someone might have done at one point.