We’ve now launched two collections of our new ebook format, the Pocket Guide series, since the beginning of the year. These short, focused books are proving really popular with our customers. We keep hearing what good value they are – priced at only £2 each, or £6 for a collection of four. And people also appreciate the content, of course. If you use the fantastic ebook reader Readmill, you can see for yourself. You can search and read comments on all our books before you buy.

We’ve been asked if we plan to print any of our Pocket Guides. It’s something we’re considering carefully, but at the moment we’re sticking to our plan of these being available as ebooks only.

If you’re new to ebooks and not sure how to read the different file formats we have on offer, one of our authors, Joe Leech, has written this piece for us on the different ways to read a Five Simple Steps ebook.

Over to Joe!

How to read a Five Simple Steps ebook

You might well have bought an ebook – in fact, you might have bought my ebook, Psychology for Designers.

The Pocket Guides from Five Simple Steps are perfect for reading on a mobile phone. The question I keep hearing is, “How do I read the Pocket Guides if I haven’t got a Kindle?” That, and, “If I don’t buy a book through Amazon, how do I get it on to my Kindle?”

When you buy a book you’ll get access to a zip file containing the book in three formats:

1. PDF

   This is the easiest way to read the book. Open up the PDF in Preview on Mac OS X or Adobe Acrobat on Windows. The books are designed to be read on screen so it shouldn’t surprise you how easy they are to read.

   You could always print the book. They’re around 50–60 pages, so with two pages per sheet (they’re still readable) you can print them on 25–30 sheets in just a handful of minutes on most printers.

   You can also upload the PDF to the lovely reading app for iPhones and iPads, Readmill. More on that later.

2. ePub

   ePub is the open ebook format. It’s so open nobody wants to support it (well, Amazon anyway). ePubs are great for reading with independent reading apps, one of the best being Readmill for iPhone and iPad. Not only does Readmill provide a lovely reading experience, it also allows you to add notes to the margin, and see other people’s notes and comments. Have a look at the Readmill website page for my book to get an idea. Once you’ve signed up, you upload the ePub file to the Readmill website and it gets sent to your iPhone or iPad.

   Aldiko is a similar and well-regarded ebook reader for Android.

3. Mobi

   The .mobi file is the file you can use with Kindle. Getting the file on to your Kindle is straightforward. Head over to Amazon, click on My Account, then Manage My Kindle. Once you’ve signed in, you’ll see a list of your books in the centre. Over on the right you’ll see a big list of links. Hit Personal Document Settings. Here you’ll see an email address, something like me_xxxxx@kindle.com. Copy that address and then send an email with the .mobi file attached and it’ll download onto your Kindle.

So what's stopping you? Go buy some Pocket Guides and get reading.