FAQ

Take Control began in 2003 as a radical rethinking of how books are written, edited, published, and yes, even how they are read. Take Control was started by the husband-and-wife team Adam and Tonya Engst. By the time they began Take Control, they had authored or edited more than 25 traditional books and written hundreds of magazine articles for major Mac magazines. And, they’d spent the last 15 years gaining experience in internet publishing with TidBITS, their website (updated quite often) and weekly email newsletter about Apple and Internet topics. These experiences helped them develop the Take Control model, which results in highly practical ebooks that cover much more detail than a magazine article but that are shorter, more focused, and more timely than a typical printed book.

In 2017, Adam and Tonya sold the Take Control series to their most prolific author, Joe Kissell. You can read about the transition in Take Control Books Acquired by Joe Kissell.

Sure thing. Just use the contact form to send us a note, telling us which ebook you’d like to review and for what publication.

People regularly write to us to ask about “missing” titles in our catalog—titles that otherwise seem like they would fit with our collection. Here are some of our responses:

• Apple Music: Our book that covers Apple Music (both in the sense of the paid streaming service and the app named Music, which was the successor to iTunes) is called Take Control of Apple Media Apps.
• Dropbox: We used to have a book on Dropbox, but when the company started taking the product in unfortunate directions, we stopped updating the book and later discontinued it. We will not be updating it in the future, as we fundamentally disagree with Dropbox’s business model and software design principles.
• iMovie: Any book that covered iMovie adequately would have to be extremely long, and it would also require vast amounts of supporting video material. It’s not a good fit for the Take Control format. In addition, even if we created such a book, it is virtually unthinkable that we would be able to sell enough copies to recoup our expenses.
• Keynote: We once had a book about Apple’s Keynote app, to go along with our books on Pages and Numbers (see next item). Unfortunately, hardly anyone bought it, and sales were too low to support continued updates. When it went far out of sync with current reality, we had to discontinue the book. There has been renewed interest in the app, and we are exploring ways we might potentially bring the topic back in some form in the future—but no guarantees!
• Numbers: We had a book on Numbers, too! Unfortunately, the author died without granting us copyright permission to modify it. That means thee only way we could ever have a book on Numbers would be to write a new one from scratch, but because it’s such a huge app, the book would also have to be huge, and there’s almost zero chance we would be able to do it in such a way that both the author and the publisher were fairly compensated.
• Photoshop: The story here is similar to that for iMovie—the book would have to be so long and complex that it wouldn’t make sense for our format, and so expensive to produce that it could never make financial sense for us.

Apart from these specific examples, we’re often asked about small, independent (but well-loved) apps. Our answer there is generally: Unless we can get significant marketing support from the developer, and a certain baseline of guaranteed income, the math doesn’t work; we wouldn’t be able to sell enough copies of such a book directly to our own customers for the author to end up with even minimum wage for the time they put in.

All that said, there are still many potential topics for future Take Control books! See the next few questions…

Great—we love to hear your ideas. Use our contact form to send us your thoughts.

Use our contact form to start the conversation.

It’s all a matter of whether the business details work out, but if your product has a sufficiently large user base, we’re happy to talk with you more. Please use the contact form to tell us what you have in mind.

We once had an affiliate program, but it disappeared when our former payment processor, eSellerate, shut down. Unfortunately, for tax reasons, it’s not feasible for us to set up our own affiliate program. If you run an ebook retail site, however, use the contact form to send us a note and we’ll talk.

No. Our ebooks do not use copy protection because it makes life harder for everyone. So we ask a favor of our readers. If you want to share your copy of an ebook you’ve bought with a friend, please do so as you would with a physical book, meaning that if your friend uses it regularly, they should buy a copy.

You do not need to have an account to place an order! Indeed, an account would serve no purpose if you aren’t already a customer. So, just ignore the username and password fields, put stuff in your cart, fill out the requested info on the cart page, and click “Check Out.” When you do this, we’ll create an account for you automatically. If you want an account because you purchased one of our books from another site, see How do I add a book to my Take Control account if I bought it somewhere else? below.

You can pay with a credit or debit card, Apple Pay, PayPal, Google Pay, iDEAL, or (for purchases over $100) wire transfer.

If you want to purchase one of our ebooks for a friend or relative, we currently offer only a low-tech approach. Run through the order process as you normally would when buying a book for yourself. Once you’ve downloaded the book, you can send it to the recipient as a normal email attachment. Or, if you’re looking for a more concrete object to present, you can save it to a flash drive.

However, if you’ve already purchased a book for yourself, our site won’t let you add it to your cart again (because we’ve had so much trouble with people buying duplicate books). So, the trick is: log out of your account first. Then add the book to your cart and log back in. Our system will display an alert when you check out, asking whether you really want to buy that book again. Click the “Continue and purchase duplicates anyway” link, then click Check Out again.

In the future, we hope to be able to offer a better, less awkward, and more flexible way to make gift purchases.

Yes, if you’re teaching a class and want to purchase copies of our ebooks for your students, we offer steep discounts. For more information and to apply for bulk pricing, visit our Class Copies page—though note that this page is not yet fully operational.

If you experience trouble ordering, logging in, or downloading a purchase, don’t panic—and don’t try to solve the problem yourself. See our page What to Do if You Have Problems with Your Order for specific advice. It boils down to “contact us and give us as much information as possible.”

Yes.

Enter your VAT ID when placing your purchase.

All payments are processed by Paddle, our authorized reseller. Paddle, as the merchant of record, is obligated to collect sales tax in certain U.S. states (the list is long and growing) and numerous other jurisdictions around the world. We have no control over the circumstances under which Paddle does or does not apply sales tax.

Note that in certain situations, if you’re connected to the internet using a VPN, and the VPN endpoint is in a state or country other than where you reside or where your bank account is, various unexpected and undesirable consequences can occur (such as being charged in the wrong currency). For the most reliable and predictable results, either turn off your VPN while placing an order, or make sure it’s connected to a server within the same tax jurisdiction.

Since mid-October, 2023, we have been using Paddle as our payment processor, replacing FastSpring (which had been the source of innumerable problems). You can read more about that change here. If you pay by credit/debit card, Apple Pay, or Google Pay, your statement will say PADDLE.NET* TAKE CTRL along with a city name that depends on your location—for example, it may say LONDON or ASTORIA. (For PayPal only, it will say PAYPAL *PADDLE.NET.)

Updated March 24, 2025 Our filenames used to be inconsistent. We finally fixed that problem, but books you downloaded before we did may still have inconsistent filenames.

As of late March 2025, all books you download from us, in any format, have canonical names like this: Take Control of Yourself (2.1), where 2.1 in this example is the version number. (There is an extension afterward, like .pdf or .epub, but whether you see these depends on your device, operating system, and settings.) But previously, some of our books had more compressed titles, like TCoYourself-2.1.

So, why weren’t our filenames always the same?

Due to limitations of the software that we use to run our website, downloadable files couldn’t have spaces in their names. We couldn’t have the “pretty” names we preferred. So, many years ago, the decision was made to remove the spaces, turn “Take Control of” into “TCo” (for compactness), and put the version number at the end following a hyphen, rather than in parentheses. That’s how we ended up with things like TCoYourself-2.1.

Even then, we were able to avoid the problem in one situation. We offer our PDFs in two forms: regular and zipped. The regular, raw PDFs will had filenames like TCoYourself-2.1.pdf. But when we zipped them, we started with the original file that has the nice-looking name, and then we give the awkward name to the Zip file, so it looked like TCoYourself-2.1-pdf.zip. But once you downloaded that and unzipped it—your browser might even do this automatically for you—you got the file with the nice, original name. Unfortunately, we couldn’t pull the same trick with EPUBs because mobile devices like iPhones and iPads sometimes need a third-party app to unzip a file. (And even if you don’t need a separate app, it could be an irritating and non-obvious extra step.) What we wanted was for people to be able to download an EPUB to the Files app and then open it immediately in the Books or Kindle app, without having to figure out how to uncompress it first.

But we solved that problem. After some research and experimentation, and a bit of programming, we came up with a workaround to the filemane limitations of our software, and now all formats use the correct, full names, including spaces. (Note that our free samples still use the old format, for the time being.) Of course, we can’t change the names of files already downloaded on your devices, but you’re welcome to rename them yourself or redownload them, in which case you’ll get the proper names.

There is, however, one small exception: On Apple operating systems, filenames can’t include colons (:). Therefore, for the few (and now-discontinued) titles of ours that have colons in the name (like Photos: A Take Control Crash Course), we’ve replaced the colon with a hyphen so it comes out as Photos - A Take Control Crash Course.

After your successful purchase, we display download links on our site. You’ll also receive both a receipt and an email message containing the download links. All of our books are available in PDF and EPUB formats so you can select the format(s) that works best for you. If you’re not sure which format is for you, we suggest PDF for a carefully laid-out page view on a computer or iPad; use EPUB for reflowable reading in Apple Books on the Mac, iPad, or iPhone as well as Kindle devices and the Kindle app. If you have any trouble downloading your books from the email message or the confirmation webpage, please feel free to log in to your Take Control account and download your books from there. Your account is available 24/7 and it will be updated with your new books almost instantly after a successful order.

Important note: On an iPad or iPhone, although PDFs can be displayed right in your browser, other file types (including EPUB and zipped PDF) download directly to the Files app. So if you tap a download link and nothing appears to happen, look in the Files app for the downloaded book. You can then tap it to open it in the appropriate app.

If you experience trouble downloading your purchases, try these tips:

• Look for the email message we sent you with the subject “Your Take Control Books order is now complete.” (This is separate from your receipt!) Try again using the download links in that message. If you don’t see the email with the download links, please check your spam/junk mail folder. More often than not, that’s where it is. (Note that we can only send messages to valid email addresses; if you mistyped your address or entered a fake address like mickey@mouse.com, you obviously won’t get the message.)
• Go to your Take Control Library and tap the format you want to download. (Refer to the “Important note” just above if doing this on an iOS/iPadOS device.)
• Read Device Advice for help with installing and reading ebooks on your iOS/iPadOS device, Kindle, or Nook.
• Don’t spend hours on this… if you’ve tried a few things and it’s not working, contact us and tell us what you’ve tried and what problem you are having. We will get back to you, probably with an easy solution!

To learn about various ways to install and read a Take Control ebook on an iPad, iPhone, Kindle, or other mobile device, see Device Advice.

Yes. The PDF version of an ebook in the Take Control series should print reasonably well on a typical home printer. Here are some printing tips:

• Click Ebook Extras on the cover of the PDF to make sure you have the latest version of the ebook and to verify that we don’t plan to release a new version shortly (if you are asked to log in, you may simply close that dialog; look in the Update Plans section to see our latest update plans).
• Consider printing 2-up (with borders showing), which puts two pages on a single piece of paper. Alternatively, if your printer supports it, try duplex printing (which puts one page on each side of a piece of paper). However, do not mix 2-up and duplex printing unless you enjoy novel pagination schemes.
• When printing on a color inkjet printer, to avoid using a lot of color ink, look for an option to print in black-and-white.
• In the unlikely event that Adobe Acrobat Reader cannot successfully print the PDF, try Preview or another PDF app.
• Your printer may not have enough memory to print the entire ebook at once. If it gets stuck before completing the job, or cannot print the ebook at all, try printing in batches of 50 or so pages.

It is OK with us if you print a single copy of your ebook at a copy shop, such as FedEx Office.

In the future, we hope to be able to offer paperback versions of many of our books, in addition to ebooks. However, we do not yet have any specific plans to announce.

You can log in to the Take Control website to re-download your ebooks. You can also set your email preferences for whether we contact you, and at which email address, by logging in and adjusting your profile.

For extensive help with your account, see the Account Help page.

At the top of the Take Control site, fill in the Email and Password fields, and click Log In. If you don’t know your password, use the Password Reset page to set a new one. (Prior to May 1, 2017, if you had an account on the TidBITS website, your Take Control account and your TidBITS account were the same account. Those accounts have now been separated, so if you change your password for one of these accounts, it will not change in the other.)

You can adjust your email address and contact preferences on the Account details page. You can choose to receive periodic email about new titles, upgrades, and special offers; only announcements of free updates to books you own; or no email other than transactional messages.

The process starts with you opening the book you obtained elsewhere and clicking or tapping the Ebook Extras link:

• In PDF format, there’s an Ebook Extras badge in the upper-right corner.
• In both EPUB and PDF, go to the About This Book chapter, a few pages from the end of the book. Then, under the Ebook Extras heading, you’ll see an “access extras related to this ebook” link.

This takes you to the title’s Ebook Extras page. If you’re already logged in before you click or tap the link, we automatically add the book to your library and display a message telling you we’ve done so! If not, click Register Book and log in (if you have an account) or click Create Account and fill out the form (if you don’t yet). That’s all there is to it! (For more details, see this blog post).

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