For a very good guide to all sorts of dog training processes and dog behavior challenges, I use and recommend Clickertraining ...that link goes to the description of this terrific ebook you download immediately, wherever you are! -- Rosana

Have you read any dog training ebooks? I have read dozens of them, and the majority have been forgettable. Ebooks are downloadable files, usually in PDF format, and they are inexpensive to create and to offer for sale. I review quite a few here on training-dogs.com, and I have evaluated considerably more dog training ebooks that I’ve decided not to give any publicity to.

Because it’s so easy to make and sell ebooks on any topic, dog training or otherwise, there is a huge worldwide internet marketing industry doing this. There are people who write ebooks on any topic, and there are people who write “killer” sales copy for the ebooks. Often the sales copy is more exciting and interesting than the ebooks. Often the ebooks are filled with half-baked, outmoded training theories — poorly explained to boot.

I guess it’s evident that I am unhappy with the low quality of dog training ebooks. Hey, I have my biases — I have been a librarian in public libraries, with a Master’s of Library Science and a lot of experience in selecting non-fiction how-to books for library collections. Both my parents were writers: my father the science fiction writer Cordwainer Smith, my mother a poet and a writer of engineering textbooks. I have been writing about dogs since I was eight, when my best friend and I wrote a series of stories about an imaginary dog we named Bounce. This background does not make me a top dog trainer — I’m nothing special — but it does give me a strength in the dog training world as someone who can evaluate the quality of books, ebooks, and DVDs offered for sale.

Now there are exceptions to my complaint regarding dog training ebooks. I really like the ones by Silvia Kent. There are some other useful ones, such as ones I recommend on this site for housetraining. And gradually, some book publishers are moving towards offering their books in ebook format as well as in print form, for ecological and financial reasons. I think we will see this trend continuing. At this writing, the Kindle ebook reader recently introduced by Amazon is getting a lot of attention. For a longer article I did on ebooks and books in general on another site of mine, see:
http://simplegreenliving.com/finding-and-reading-ebooks

I look forward to a time when the title of this article will be out of date.

After all, ebooks have some real advantages over books. You can have them immediately after you order them. You can get them from most countries, without international shipping… I have seen from my website statistics that people come from all over the world. You can read them on your computer, possibly print the whole thing if the publisher allows it, or just print out a few pages to take outside with you for training. Very ecological. (If the publisher hasn’t made printing easy, you can use a screen capture program like SnagIt to copy and then print some pages.)

We are living in an information explosion on dog training. Stay with the best books, DVDs, and ebooks you can find. For the books and DVDs, the best source is Dogwise — for ebooks, I have yet to find a good central source, so I will make this website more of a clearing house. Stay tuned… I’m working on a list of the best dog training ebooks, which I will put on this blog soon.

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