The first of the results returned was an Amazon.com link for 'Bitcoin: And the Future of Money' by [CNN Money reporter] Jose Pagliery. I doubt that Amazon accepts bitcoin directly -- and I can always use a credit card if I really want the book -- so I decided to continue searching. I did note that the book was '#31 in Books > Business & Money > Economics > Digital Currencies, a reference which might be useful later.
A significant number of search results appeared on the theme of 'What is an Order Book?', as in Bitcoin Trading: Interpreting Order Books. Thanks to a longtime personal interest in investing and markets, I'm already familiar with the term, and didn't need to spend any time on the subject.
Many search results led to outdated pages like Where to Spend Your Bitcoins (October 2012). Here a comment directed me to SynergeticPress.com, 'first book publisher to accept bitcoin for payment'. I couldn't find any books about bitcoin, so I noted the resource for future reference and moved on. It was reassuring to know that I'm not the only person who can't figure out what to do with bitcoin.
Eventually I came to bitcoinbook.info, a sales page for 'Mastering Bitcoin' by Andreas M. Antonopoulos, one of the gurus for the bitcoin movement. Although several other references hinted that I could buy the book using bitcoin, the publisher's checkout page offered only credit card payment. Perhaps I overlooked something, so I'll come back to this later. While I was looking at different resources for the book, I found one that offered a PDF version marked 'Early Release: Raw and Unedited'. Try before you buy? I'm good with that.
Most of the other resources that I encountered for books about bitcoin pointed to sales pages on Amazon. Finally I came to The Book of Satoshi.
Provides a convenient way to parse through what Bitcoin’s creator wrote over the span of the two years that constituted his "public life" before he disappeared from the Internet ... at least under the name Satoshi Nakamoto.
The page even had a link to 'Buy Ebook with Bitcoins', exactly what I was looking for! I followed the procedure to pay using my bitcoin wallet and about an hour later received an email informing me that 'Your files are ready to download'.
The book arrived in a ZIP file containing two formats -- EPUB & PDF -- and I immediately opened the PDF version to verify the content. In retrospect, it's completely appropriate that my first bitcoin purchase was for an ebook about the inventor of bitcoin. The entire exercise helped me to generate plenty of ideas for future blog posts.
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