Created: 10 Dec 2006
I’ve got a lot of technical reading to do over the next few months, so I started subscribing to O’Reilly’s Safari, which allows me to read their books online. There are several subscription options; mine limits me to reading about ten books at any one time for just under ÂŁ13 a month.
O’Reilly, in my estimation, is the most consistently useful publisher of books on IT implementation, although I’ve been disappointed by some of their recent titles. While I was considering handing over my credit card details I stumbled across a few titles published by Addison Wesley and that was what clinched it for me. In fact, Safari also hosts books by many other publishers including Prentice Hall, Que, Microsoft and Sams, which means that nearly all technical books I have an interest in are available. It’s almost worth having just so I never need to go looking for the office copies of Stevens’ TCP/Illustrated or Solaris Internals. Strangely though, TCP/IP Illustrated Volume 3 is missing, as is NFS Illustrated.
So, what do I think of the service? Overall it fits my needs rather nicely. The UI is reasonable, with a helpful search box that suggests completions to my search terms. Results are reasonably relevant and I can read an extract of the books before committing to adding them to my list of books. Importantly, it’s not crippled by any sort of DRM and all you need is a browser and a PDF reader. Rather than trying to make water not wet, they’ve just made it inconvenient to leach the entire text of a book manually and banned spiders and leaching software in their Usage Policy.
I have a few niggles to report though. The email address verification did not work for me, although O’Reilly’s support people resolved this issue for me within hours of my email to them and it did not prevent me using the site at any time. Annoyingly, the code snippets within the books are placed within a fixed width frame, which requires tiresome scrolling to read the lines that exceed this width. It would save me time if on login, I was taken to the last page I read and if the UI remembered my current position in each of my books. Currently I spend far too long navigating to the section I was in the middle of reading before I logged out.
Slightly more seriously, I signed up thinking I could have ten books available at any one time. It’s not that straightforward, as O’Reilly use a system called slots, with each book occupying a number of slots. Many of the books I’m interested in actually occupy two slots. In fact, having looked around it seems that the quality books take up two slots, for example Programming Python and each volume of TCP/IP Illustrated. This is a fair representation of their value to me, so I can’t really be too grumpy about it.
Obviously, I won’t be able to rely on the service to help me diagnose problems with the office Internet connection, so that printed copy of Stevens will still be useful. Overall it works really well as a complement to the usual print copies and I’m impressed with the implementation.
I know Safari has been around for a while and I’d really love to know if it makes any money. My guess is that the corporate subscriptions make them some money and the personal subscriptions like mine are a loss leader for the corporate subs and the purchasing of print copies. The question is who will conquer the market for digital publication outside the unusual technical market.