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Apologies if this seems frivolous but I've been trying to find the LaTeX Companion 2ed by Mittelbach et al. in ebook form.

Other than illegal rip-offs there doesn't seem to be anywhere I can buy it in electronic form despite multiple Google searches. I'm not sure if I'm missing something, it seems strange that a book about Latex would only be available in paper form, hence the question.

Does anyone know if its being sold as an ebook and where?

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2 Answers

up vote 15 down vote accepted

The Companion is available electronically via Safari Books Online. That is not quite the same as being able to buy as an ebook, I guess, but it is electronic. Note that this is a subscription service, so you don't 'own' the electronic version in the way you do with the paperback.

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Unfortunately the book is outdated when considering the current condition where there are many new or updated packages. – Click Me Aug 12 '12 at 19:52
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@GarbageCollector I believe that it took several years to write the current version: I doubt Frank will be volunteering to look at it again any time soon. – Joseph Wright♦ Aug 12 '12 at 19:53
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@GarbageCollector: I disagree: It's still a useful collection of packages. – Martin Schröder Aug 14 '12 at 17:42
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I find that The LaTeX Companion 2/e is still an essential reference. At the very least it provides a starting point for using a package or performing a task. But since it is task-focused instead of feature-focused, it is often the best introduction to a package or a task available anywhere at any price. (The amount of work that had to have gone into that 1000+ page work boggles the mind.) – Vladimir G. Ivanovic Aug 14 '12 at 23:21
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@GarbageCollector The purpose of the the Companion is to give a broad introduction to various tasks that one may encounter that go beyond an introduction level. It is not meant to give all details (and never was) but enough to get most jobs properly done. For that very reason it doesn't really outdate just because a package gets some additional features. Of course over time new important packages may appear and thus over time any such book gets dated. But I fairly strongly believe that this isn't yet the case, for the range of tasks TLC covers. – Frank Mittelbach Aug 15 '12 at 8:42
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up vote 13 down vote

The second edition of the LaTeX Companion is not available as an ebook (at least not legally, give or take some scanned copies that float around on the internet). For this edition this status is very unlikely to change. (I'm the author, so I'm not just guessing)

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Thanks for the update @Frank. If it isn't confidential I'd love to understand why? I've bought a physical version and will duly be scan-snapping into a pdf myself but I'm really curious as to why authors don't automatically make their works available as ebooks as a matter of course. – Tahnoon Pasha Aug 17 '12 at 15:27
@TahnoonPasha it is not confidential. It is simply that in 2005 it wasn't considered as being a suitable publishing path. It is not (just) the authors who make such decisions, the copyright is with the publisher even if the authors do have a say. These days many books are being published in both formats and for a future edition that will probably the case too. Whether there is anything that could be done for the existing edition remains to be seen. – Frank Mittelbach Aug 21 '12 at 6:43

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