This week I was approached by a book publisher, to review their books on this site. After pointing them to my blog honesty post they agreed to send me two of their latest books for review.

Unfortunately it is not possible to review them because the publisher, Packt, doesn't trust me or you.

The publisher, supplied books, that for now are remaining anonymous to protect their poor authors, in both traditional paper and what they call Adobe PDF eBook.

Password protected pdf are NOT eBooks!!!! You cannot read them on an eBook reader. What sort of eBook does that make this? An unread one.

To read these books I am either going to have to print out approximately 250 pages or read them on my PC.

Sorry that's just not going to happen. Either use a standard ebook DRM format for your ebooks or trust your customers. It's not exactly hard to crack a password on an adobe pdf but why should you force me to "potentially" break the law to read your book.

To make matters worse it would appear that every single page of the book has a header reminding me that the book is mine and where I live. I know where I live thank you. I don't need reminding.

It also says

"... and is licensed for the sole use by Brian Teeman on 14 November 2008"

Can I not read it next week?

Today Brad Baker announced that if I want to search www.joomla.org or community.joomla.org then I have to do the search at forum.joomla.org.

"Searching for 'stuff' on the Joomla.org suite of sites

What is one thing that Google knows how to do? Search. Therefore, we've setup an excellent tool, using Google to help you locate resources from almost all the Joomla sites in one place. To use it, you will need to start here: http://forum.joomla.org"

Oh great of course, that is so obvious why did I never think to go to a second web site in order to search the first web site.

Oops no even that's not correct. I can't search www.joomla.org

Brad's blog post is entitled "Have questions? We have answers."

There is a big difference between having the answers locked away and letting someone ask the question and get the answer.

Come on guys how is anyone going to find anything. It's no good telling people that it's on the web site and that they should search if you don't provide the search tools.

And don't say that it's not possible to use the standard Joomla search across multiple sites. I've done it and its not hard it just needs some modified search plugins. The search button, in the top right hand corner of course, at www.reformjudaism.org.uk searches across 6 different sites.