Welcome to the Safari Jungle

Robby Russell writes "Paper books have a tendency to accumulate dust, take up large amounts of shelf space and be a painful reminder that you need to get rid of stuff when moving time comes and you find yourself packing up the same Pascal book for an eighth time. Granted, the book provides a level of self-accomplishment and it's always great to have your best books out in direct sight of anyone who may come over to your home or office. You know the type; the ones who are observant and notice the books that you want the world to know that you've read, as if you were to say, 'Been there, done that.' You can't tell me that you don't put some of them up intentionally. ;-)" Russell is taken with O'Reilly's floating-rental system called Safari; read on for his review of the system.

(various)
author	(various)
pages	(various)
publisher	O'Reilly and other participating publishers
rating	9
reviewer	Robby Russell
ISBN	(various)
summary	Technical book rental is here, and you may find the convenience a compelling enough factor to give up the paper versions of the available titles.

O'Reilly has come up with an interesting solution to your lack of physical shelf space: a virtual bookshelf. Safari Bookshelf is a great resource for all things technical. They recently went over 1,000 titles available online, 24/7. Several publishers have joined forces with O'Reilly to provide so many titles. Que, Alpha, Sams, Microsoft Press (and O'Reilly itself) are a few of the big-name publishers that are part of Safari. Currently, 75% of all O'Reilly books are available through Safari. (With plans for adding 10+ books per month, the selection is growing rapidly, too.)

Safari subscriptions can be had in 10-, 20- or 30-slot varieties, depending on how much you care to read (and spend). Prices end up close to $1.50 per slot each month, with slight discounts if you buy annually rather than by the month. (A $9.99/month 5-slot shelf is available too, if you just want to test the waters.)

Recently, I had the privilege of giving Safari a test-run thanks to the generous offer made to user groups.

The website's navigation was fairly easy to grasp, and I was able to start searching for books as soon as I logged into the system. O'Reilly's made browsing pleasant, by listing the main categories and allowing you to branch down into subcategories to find the book you may or may not be looking for.

I was given a 10-book shelf to start my trial of Safari. This account would typically go at $14.99/month (or $159.99/year). The bookshelf is great. You can add a book to your bookshelf and you keep it there for 30 days, after which you can remove the book and replace it with a different one. So, you can have 10 books in your "shelf" at any given time, and switch no more than 10 books a month under this account level. That is 120 books a year for roughly $1.33/book. That's impressive.

It just so happened that I was currently working on migrating from Sendmail to Postfix recently and wanted to read up more on Postfix to see if there was more I could do to keep my server running happily. I typed in "postfix" in the search, and voila! 109 books were found with that word in the title or description. The search results allowed me to View by Book and/or View by Section (which I found really helpful by showing me a section of the book that contained the word "postfix"). I scanned a few more books in greater depth, looking at the Table of Contents of various books and even looking at the books' chapter previews. A lot of text to look at before I even decide on checking out a book. Being in a bookstore wouldn't have been this good: you can't search through a bookstore for a specific keyword in all texts and get back these kinds of results.

After reviewing a small handful of books, I felt comfortable with my decision and checked out the appropriately-titled book by Sams, "Postfix" by Richard Blum and added it to my bookshelf. The book will be on my bookshelf for the next 30 days. Immediately, I went over to My Bookshelf and found myself looking through the same text you would find in the paper version of this book (but in the font face and size that I set in my browser preferences). It lets me print a page, send the page as an email to someone, etc. I was reading about open relays, and added a bookmark to the page which shows up on the "My Safari" personal page listing all the books I have currently checked out. That page also shows recent searches, newly available books, public notes, etc. With a few clicks, I can go from my computer desktop to page 152 of The Perl Cookbook which is quicker than me looking through my library of paper books and finding my place.

I have since added six more books and visit My Safari page roughly 5+ times throughout my day to read more on various topics. All this content available anytime I need it, and I still have spaces left in my bookshelf. They do offer 5-slot Safari Bookshelf for those who don't need 10 books a month, which is probably where I would fall. The great thing is that this is very affordable. (After calculating the costs of all the books I had bought in the past year, I could have paid for and viewed roughly 232 books plus the 8 technical books I bought last year.)

On the downside, colleagues who come by my home or office won't see my new copy of MySQL Cookbook because it is online rather than on my shelf showing another O'Reilly animal. I might have to print out the covers and tape them to my old school books to deal with that for the time being, but I am sure that Safari Bookshelf is how I plan to spend money on technical documentation from now on.

If it were a Tom Robbins book however, I couldn't see myself sitting in a cozy chair reading it on a laptop; this idea only makes sense to me for technical information because I am sitting at my computer anyways -- and where else would I need technical documentation?

---

If this idea intrigues you, visit O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf page. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

About Safari

[LemurShop]

I have been a subscriber (basic) for about three months and found it extremely helpful. One of my pleasant surprises and very commendable on the Safari guys is that they didn't fall into the drm/encrypted crap I'm sure most publishing houses would fall into in a similar undertaking. You can save a page as html, print it up, do what you want to without having to go through draconian security measures. I still would like to see more New Riders Publishing books; some of the best usability and macromedia books come from them.

Tried it, too slow, poor indexing

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried Safari for a few months then cancelled. The servers were slow to unresponsive. And even when they were responsive, the books themselves seem poorly indexed. I especially found this true with reference books where you want to find specific info, rather than read from cover to cover. It might be OK for that (reading from cover to cover) but as other posters have pointer out, I'd rather do that with a physical book in my lap rather than on a computer screen. I think it IS a good idea -- and perhaps they can make it work, but it didn't appeal to me. BootedBear (singed in as a coward as ny account appears to be fu'd)

No real ebooks

[javatips]

I've checked their website, and it looks like your stuck with reading your books on the Web.

They do not seem to have any option to be able to read your book offline or download it on your PDA (Palm OS or Pocket PC).

When I read a book, I usually use the time I have in public transit. So unless they provide a way to read the books offline (I would prefer on my Tungsten T) it of little use for me (and I'm probably not the only one in that situation).

The service is still neat and a step in a good direction.

Automated book download

[etcpasswd]

As a recent Safari member, I concur with the reviewer about the advantages. It is a commendable effort to pool and convince so many publishers to have their books online at a fractional price of the hardcopy edition. This definitely is an advantage in the world of ever changing language/technology versions, where the new versions make the old obsolete. However, the Terms of Serivce are't as flexible as the book version.

When I was put up with dialup modem, I wrote a script to download the pages of the book I had in my shelf (I hated waiting for a while before the next page downloaded). Not only did Safari prevent me from accessing the content, but also I received automated emails (one for each attempt) stating that this is unacceptable according to TOS (Obviously, I clicked on "I agree" without reading). Maybe I could have figured out how to fool their detection mechanism in a few more attempts, but low bandwidth isn't enough reason for me to violate the TOS.

Depth, usability and reference material

[jj_johny]

I looked at possibly using the Safari system but had a number of problems with it. Instead of Safari I used the Barnes and Noble method - get a cup of coffee at their in-store coffee bar and look at all the books I want. So here are my pet peeves about the whole idea.

1. The books are generally fire and forget arrangements. Not to say the author didn't write a good book but by the time they finish it, the book is somewhat out of date. Thus you get lots almost up to date material.

2. There is no real linkage between the online book and the online resources. So the book, whether in print or on line, just floats out there as a standalone entity.

3. The point of view/writing style/aim of the author really makes some of the books good to read but not good for reference (online or off).

That said I think that it is great that the service is offered but to me the need for good web based documentation is not fufilled by just putting the books online. It would be great to see an paid online reference that was high quality and well organized. For those of us in the tech world taht have to surf through lots of different disciples, the current crop of books, web sites and vendor support leaves a lot to be desired.

I prefer physical books

[lizzybarham]

I used to have a Safari account and it was nice, but since I could only check out 5 or so books, when I was done with a book and it wasn't in my on-line book shelf, I could not go to it for reference later on, as where my physical books stay on the shelf and I may refer to them at a much later time, possibly even years.

Re:Question for existing users

[lastberserker]

These are not holes, some books are old, these are converted and put online based on subscribers' requests. Here:

Most Requested Titles

Despite the growing number of books in Safari, we haven't included all of O'Reilly's books online. (About 75 percent of our books have been added.) However, we get requests from users all the time who expect to find a particular O'Reilly title in Safari, so we thought we'd talk about some of the reasons why some books are not in Safari.

Most of our books are produced using FrameMaker and then converted to XML. Some of our older books were produced using Troff, however, and have proven to be more difficult to convert to XML. In some of those cases, we've decided to wait for the next edition of the book, when it will be converted to FrameMaker. Not all of our books are produced the same way, and we don't have conversion processes set up to handle every arbitrary input format.

We publish about ten or eleven new books per month. On average, we convert about eight of those titles and bring them into Safari. We choose the books we think are the most important to convert, but we don't always make the choice that agrees with all users, so getting your feedback is important.

Re:Company subscription?

[Wise Dragon]

Yeah, there's a company called Books 24x7 [books24x7.com] which my company, . subscribes to.

Re:About Safari

[urbazewski]

Back in December Tim O'Reilly wrote a thoughtful essay about why he isn't worried about piracy [openp2p.com], he mentions the Safari system there. Some of his conclusions:

Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

Lesson 2: Piracy is progressive taxation

Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.

Lesson 4: Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.

Lesson 5: File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.

Lesson 6: "Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service.

Lesson 7: There's more than one way to do it.

There was also a /. discussion [slashdot.org].

1 Slot 1= 1 book?

[theguru]

When I evaluated Safari last year, most books took up more than 1 slot in your bookshelf. Beginer, and "SQL at a glance" typee books took up 1 slot. Intermediate and pure reference books took up two, and advanced books took up 3.

Is this still the case? It made the system actual value a lot less that it initially seemed. A 5 slot shelf can only hold one advanced book and 1 reference book at a time. At $9.99/mo, I decided it was better to purchase these books.

Re:10 Slots != 10 Books

[entrylevel]

Yeah, the pocket references take up 0.5 slots. I haven't seen any that take up more than 1 (yet).

Re:Company subscription?

[Anonymous Coward]

ProQuest (at www.umi.com) offers a "site license" subscription to Safari as one of their products. Geared to libraries, I think, but appropriate for a company's technical library. I was referred to this company by Safari customer support after I learned that I couldn't pay for my subscription on my company credit card (boneheaded corporate policy decision). I've only done basic investigation, so I don't know how different their interface is, or how this "site license" arrangement works (shared bookshelf?, individual authentication?, etc.).