Safari Online Books has potential to change the way people get reference information on technical issues.
Don't worry, I'm not climbing onto the "Books are Dead!" platform just yet. I think despite technology's best efforts it will be very hard to banish the book as the preferred "text/image/information delivery medium". But eBooks have their place, and the best use I've seen so far is Safari.
Safari is an online library. You pay a regular fee, and in exchange you get online access to their books. Currently there are only 2000 titles, but they seem to be adding new ones pretty regularly. They've focused (intelligently, I think) on technical IT / Programming related books. Really, this is the perfect market for such a service, as the information changes constantly, and often the information you're looking for would only be used for one project and set aside. An intelligent codemonkey doesn't have a tremendous challenge adapting to new languages, they just need the ability to understand the syntax and learn any special cases. So if they can jump online to get the basics and then be able to refer back to it, they really don't need the physical book. And if they need to refer back to it for a different project a year later, they can jump online and refer to the latest version, which might have more options available to them that they wouldn't get from their older book sitting on the shelf. They can also refer to the book while away from their office or where-ever the book resides, which makes supporting things off-site much better as well.
I've heard that they are associated with O'Reilly, the publishing company, and it's easy to believe as they seem to have every O'Reilly title there is. There are also some business books. I'd like to see some more technical reference titles from an engineering or science perspective.
But it's a great start. It's a valid concern that a CRT is not the best method for reading, either for eyestrain or radiation. But that part is already there, and it's unlikely that this one addition will have that big of an impact. The improvement is to make the dispaly devices better, not look at them less. And while it may not have the comfort of holding a book, most people aren't really curling up on the couch on a Sunday to read Java in a Nutshell anyway.
In any case, I'd recommend anyone who does a lot of coding or computer work that can get their work to pay for it to sign up. It's one of those ideas that's really obvious after someone else does it.
Posted by ktismael at February 11, 2004 5:22 PM