Announcing the MSDN Office Developer Bookstore

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We have some great news for Office and SharePoint developers. We launched this morning a new section on the MSDN Office Developer Center where you can find Office and SharePoint books that matter to developers. We also provide free book chapters!

MSDN Office Developer Bookstore

Here’s the set of links where you can find our bookstore pages:

Why books matter to developers?

Research has shown that books are one of the most popular learning resources among developers. I agree with Research. Devs love books and most of us like collecting books with code samples. Why not have a place where we can have a live inventory of cool books that matter to Office and SharePoint developers? Also, MVPs and experts from our development community have authored more than 40 Office and SharePoint top-seller books. Why not help promote their work and wisdom? To make it even better for the community, the Office Developer Documentation group has contacted different publishers and acquired more than 70 book chapters. You can access book chapters on MSDN for free from our bookstore. Some book chapters are already published and some are coming soon. We will keep adding them to our book excerpts page as we publish more.

We joined the Amazon Associates program, so you if you want to buy a book, you can go directly from our bookstore pages to Amazon.

Not a developer? If you are an IT professional or an Information Worker and want to find Office and SharePoint books that matter to you, you can also find books on TechNet and Office Online (coming soon).

We’d like to invite everyone from the community to make our bookstore even better by referring more books. We are interested in hearing your recommendations for Office and SharePoint books that matter to developers. You can contact us through our Facebook group, our MSDN_Office twitter feed,  or you can leave your comments @ this blog entry.

Enjoy!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 09, 2009
    PingBack from http://asp-net-hosting.simplynetdev.com/announcing-the-msdn-office-developer-bookstore/

  • Anonymous
    April 09, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 10, 2009
    Top News Stories 7 Must Read Articles - SharePoint in the Enterprise (CMS Wire) Houston, we have a problem

  • Anonymous
    April 10, 2009
    I find it a great pity that the first comment you got here was from someone shamelessly plugging his own book. (Which therefore I will not do). I do have a question, though. Several people's sites include Amazon links to selected books which if the links are clicked and a book bought bring them a small amount of revenue to cover the costs involved in having the site. I notice that you have the same Amazon links. Q1: Isn't this unfair competition? Q2: Who is getting the revenue from these links ? Q2a: Is Microsoft that hard up these days? Q2b: If not Microsoft, who ? You are using Microsoft resources to provide and publicise these links so Microsoft employees should not imo benefit personally. Suggestion: Split the Amazon revenues equally among all Office product MVPs! (Of which, yes, I am one).

  • Anonymous
    April 10, 2009
    Dennis: Congrats on the new book! This is a book that matters to Office (Excel) developers, so we are pleased to include it on our Bookstore. Thanks so much for the ping. I am sure Excel developers will be delighted to hear about your book :). Mike: You bring up a fair question. I should have commented a bit more about this in my blog entry. As I mentioned before, the MSDN – Office Bookstore was built with the following goals in mind: • Create an Office Bookstore on Office Online, MSDN, and TechNet to showcase the best Office and SharePoint books and book excerpts. • Promote books from MVPs and experts from the community. • Build a list of recommended books and work closely with product teams and engage with MVPs to establish/maintain a list. Because the MSDN Office Developer Center is a corporate Web site, we could not “borrow” content (book covers, links, text) from the Amazon.com Web site. It’s not the same thing to manage a personal Web site than a company Web site. We’ve been willing to launch our bookstore for ages, but we wanted to do the “right” thing. That said, Microsoft Corporation and Amazon signed a contract and agreement so that we could cross-promote books from Amazon.com and use content from Amazon in the “right” way. We are now officially part of the Amazon Associates program and we have a corporate account that we use to sign-in to get the content we are using in our bookstore. That includes the links that have our corporate affiliates ID. No Microsoft employee is personally benefiting from this program since we have a corporate account and parties from both companies are aware of the existence of this project. Regarding the revenue, we are being transparent by mentioning we are part of the Amazon Affiliates program. That’s why I even linked to the program page from my blog entry :). This program allows you to get revenue only after you click a link AND purchase the book from Amazon. Clicks won’t give us any revenue.  Given the nature of our Web site, we are not forecasting a significant number of completed purchases from our MSDN bookstore pages. Looks at the store and you'll see we have less than 100 books that matter to Office and SharePoint devs to promote. Not much to sell here, but still! We are delighted to help Office and SharePoint experts from the community promote their books and devs find good books we all recommend. If purchases are completed from our Web site, revenue goes to the MSDN group. How can we return the revenue to MVPs? Office and SharePoint MVPs matter a lot to us and Microsoft is constantly working on different initiatives to promote and acquire MVP content. Here’s a couple sites where you can find content that we have acquired recently from MVPs: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/cc441428.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/bb266408.aspx Hope the bookstore can help promote books and if you have any great books to recommend we'd love to hear your suggestions. -Erika

  • Anonymous
    April 22, 2010
    The comment has been removed