Save 50% in Take Control 7th Anniversary Sale

It’s hard to believe, we know, but it was seven years ago, in 2003, when we tentatively announced our first Take Control ebook, Joe Kissell’s “Take Control of Upgrading to Panther.” (Remember what was new and cool in Panther? No, we don’t either.) Now it’s time to celebrate Take Control’s seventh anniversary with a 50-percent-off sale. Order any of our ebooks at half-off through the end of December using this coupon-loaded link.

In retrospect, we started Take Control at a particularly auspicious time. The PDF format was nearly ubiquitous, we had all become accustomed to buying things on the Internet, and most of the major publishers hadn’t yet figured out ebooks in a big way. That enabled us to focus on writing, editing, and producing the best possible ebooks we could, constantly refining what we considered a good ebook to be as we went.

Since then, the bar has risen much higher for what is expected of an ebook publisher, and we’ve plunged into an exciting new world, taking our readers along for the ride as we come up with better ways for our books to provide the help you need, when you need it. Most notably, you can now log in to your Take Control Ebooks account to see exactly which ebooks you own and re-download them (on an iOS device, you can even read them directly from your account). For those who need alternative ebook formats like EPUB (for iBooks in iOS, and for other e-readers) and Mobipocket (for the Kindle), we’ve (mostly) made those formats
available in your account for all but our older titles.

We may be pretty good at writing and publishing books, but we’ve had to stretch to learn ever more about delegation, project management, finance, and development. At times, the entire project is exhausting. But we start each day (well, most days), re-energized thanks to you, our readers, who buy and read our books, who write in with anecdotes about what’s working and what’s not, and who give us constructive comments. And we’re by no means done! We have lots of ideas in the works for more account-related capabilities, easier ways for you to read the ebooks, faster publishing of more file formats, and of course, more ebooks on the topics you care about.

As a thank you to everyone who reads the Take Control series and as an encouragement for anyone who hasn’t yet tried our ebooks (so please, spread the word!), we’re holding this seventh anniversary sale for the rest of the month. Whether you want to update a bunch of older ebooks all at once, see what’s new in the Take Control catalog (check out “Take Control of Your Paperless Office” and “Take Control of Mail on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch”), or order a bunch of ebooks to put on a thumb drive as a gift (“Take Control of iPhone Basics” and “Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ” might be especially appreciated), you can save
50 percent on whatever you buy through the end of December.

Thanks again for your support, and our best wishes for a happy holiday season and end to 2010!