We had a welcome surprise the other day when we learned that The Cult of LEGO won both the Wild Card category and the Grand Prize at the 2012 San Francisco Book Festival.

The judges are book experts, and the grand prize winner is selected based on its popular appeal and the authors' passion for their story. According to the Festival organizers, "The book's impressive scope and its fascinating coverage of a world that touches millions won over the judges."

We've been really pleased with the success of The Cult of LEGO, and it's rewarding to see that book people like it, too. Well, maybe book people are LEGO people. Who knows.

Here's to playing with plastic bricks. More to come.

From Peter Gasston, the author of The Book of CSS3

1. Device-responsive pages
The big growth area of web browsing is on smartphone and tablet devices such as Android, iPhone and iPad. New media features and page layout modules in CSS3 let you make pages which respond to the capabilities of the device that's viewing them, automatically optimizing your content for multiple screen sizes and giving your visitors a tailored experience.

2. Eye candy!
CSS3 brings web documents to life without complicated JavaScript. Rotate, scale and skew page elements in both two and three dimensions, add smooth transitional animations to elements when their values change, and go even further with keyframe animations which give you fine control over the behavior of your page elements.

3. A better reading experience
The Web was made for reading text, but for years we've had to use a handful of fonts in a very conservative way. CSS3 brings the power to use any font you wish, to decorate the text with drop shadows and outlining, plus new ways of laying out the text such as in multiple columns, like a newspaper or magazine.

4. Easier to maintain
Using CSS2.1 usually means adding images (and extra markup) to your documents in order to achieve what should be simple effects. Something as basic as adding rounded corners to an element can mean using up to four extra empty elements to accommodate the graphics required to fake the appearance. CSS3 was created to address just these problems, so you can add rounded corners, drop shadows, gradient backgrounds and much more without writing unnecessary markup or creating multiple image files - meaning a lot less work to make and maintain your documents.

5. Cleaner code
The greatly expanded range of selectors in CSS3 means you can add special formatting to links depending on their destination, loop through long tables and lists, even select form elements depending on their current state - all without having to clutter your code with surplus class attributes.

The Unofficial LEGO Builder's Guide is now available in Russian! Photo courtesy of Petr Semenov, general manager, re:Store Publishing. Получить свой экземпляр сейчас.

Dear Readers,

We've been having some internal discussion about how to price our ebooks.

Let's face it. We're already in the bittorrent library but membership in that not-so-exclusive club isn't really the way to fuel a business.

Most technical book publishers are offering ebooks at anywhere from 60-80 percent of a book's list price. We've toyed with (and we're currently offering) ebooks at 50 percent of a book's list price (or free with purchase from us), which seems fair to me as long as we and our authors are actually getting that 50 percent. The problem, if it is a problem, is that when our ebooks are sold through retailers those retailers take a significant cut off the top because they need to make money too. As a result, we get something closer to 35 or 40 percent of a book's list price, if not less.

It takes time and real work to create the sort of quality, handcrafted books that No Starch Press is known for. Our readers expect a lot from us and we aim to deliver with each publication. It's important to me that No Starch Press continue to succeed.

So my question to you is, what do you think is a fair price for an ebook? Figure that the print cost is perhaps 10 percent of the book's list price and that when we sell books to resellers we get about 50 percent of the book's list price. (That's why 50 percent off list for ebooks purchased directly from us could make sense.)

So I'm turning to you, our readers, to tell me what you think and to offer creative suggestions. We could, for example, price ebooks according to a timed reduction scheme. For example, they might start out at 75 percent of list price and drop in price every six months, as a particular book ages. Or we could stick with 50 percent off for those No Starch Press VIPs. You know, the ones carrying those special gold cards. Or what?

What do you think?

Please share your comments on this post. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for your support.

Bill