By Dale Farris, Secretary
Golden Triangle PC Club
March 2003

Service Overview

Ever get the feeling you can never catch up with your reading? For information systems professionals, this is not an uncommon state to be in as they witness the continued increase in the number of titles published in their field. Finding the books that they need can also present logistical difficulties as not all bookstores carry the types of sophisticated titles IS folks need, titles that are changing as rapidly as operating systems and application software. There is also the practical problem of financially keeping up with the steady stream of important computer books they need in their work. Even though online book sale sites do provide a good resource to manage these difficulties, most IS professionals have realized that for many reasons it is darn near impossible to maintain an up-to-date library of computer books.

Most savvy, professional information systems folks long ago realized the importance of O'Reilly, the leading publisher of computer books, and they trust O'Reilly to provide computer books that are always dependable, solid, informative, and highly useful. Now, O'Reilly adds still further to their already entrenched leadership role in the world of computer material with the launching of their remarkable service, the Safari Bookshelf.

At this link, you can begin to acquaint yourself with the many features of this impressive service that focuses on the important need of information technology professionals for access to books in their field. safari.oreilly.com

Once you arrive at the main site, you will quickly see how unique and special is this powerful new service, and how important it is for anyone with interest in computer books.

About Safari

In July 2002, O'Reilly & Associates and The Pearson Technology Group joined forces to create a joint venture, Safari Books Online. The premise was simple:
--Take the best IT books from the best authors and publishers.
--Put them into an online, searchable database.
--Offer it to IT professionals as a means of addressing their never-ending need to quickly pinpoint reliable code examples and technical information.

The result is truly extraordinary. Safari's flagship service, Safari Tech Books Online, has exceeded all expectations, selling site licenses to Fortune 50 companies, major universities, and leading training organizations worldwide

Faced with increasing client demand for more content in more functional areas, Safari has tapped into the deep content pools of its venture partners, O'Reilly and Pearson, whose imprints include such well-known names as Addison-Wesley, Alpha, Financial Times Prentice Hall, Cisco Press, New Riders, Peachpit Press, Prentice Hall PTR, Que and Sam's. With an expanded product offering designed to address the needs for reference content in the areas of information technology, desktop applications, and business, Safari is fast changing the way the corporate, academic, and training worlds access information.

Safari Partners

The Safari Technology Partner Network is comprised of leading edge technology providers that work with Safari Books Online to make the service both powerful and easy to use. Safari Books Online uses a custom platform built by Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing that features relevance-ranking searching and contextualized results presentation. Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing specializes in adding value to data supplied by world-renowned organizations and creating flexible, state-of-the-art information solutions.

Books Available

There are now over 1,000 titles in Safari! This includes more technical books than ever for you to choose from, or search through, to find the information you need.

Title Categories

Applied Sciences
Artificial Intelligence
Business
Certification
Computer Science
Databases
Desktop Applications
Desktop Publishing
E-Commerce
Enterprise Computing
Graphics
Hardware
Human-Computer Interaction
Internet/Online
IT Management
Markup Languages
Multimedia
Networking
Operating Systems
Programming
Software Engineering

These categories are accessible in a user friendly folder structure that works like any expandable folder structure, and when you open these categories, you begin to see how much work has gone into the back-end planning and design of this super site. Each category is further subdivided into various detailed categories, all logically labeled with terms very familiar to any information technology professional, and designed to enable you to quickly locate the precise online book you need. The structure eventually serves up a lengthy list of the hundreds and hundreds of titles that are accessible in this service.

You can also browse the ton of available lists using the Safari search engine that has been explicitly designed to aid in your search for information technology books stored in the massive inventory. You can search by title, author, ISBN, or publisher.

Most Requested Titles

Despite the growing number of books in Safari, O'Reilly has not included all their available titles online, but about 75% of their books have been added. Since O'Reilly obviously gets requests from users all the time who expect to find a particular O'Reilly title in Safari, they do have a rationale for the inclusion of titles in the Safari service.

Most of O'Reilly's books are produced using FrameMaker and then are converted to XML. However, some of their older books were produced using Troff, and have proven to be more difficult to convert to XML. In some of those cases, they have decided to wait for the next edition of the book, when it will be converted to FrameMaker. Not all of O'Reilly's books are produced the same way, and they do not have a conversion process set up to handle every arbitrary input format.

Remember, O'Reilly publishes about ten or eleven new books per month! That's a lot of books to convert, but eventually most of these super O'Reilly works will manage to find their way into the Safari service.

On average, O'Reilly converts about eight of their monthly titles and brings them into Safari. O'Reilly also chooses the books they think are the most important to convert, but they do not always make the choice that agrees with all users, so getting your feedback is important.

Super Features

Safari Bookshelf is the premier electronic reference library for programmers and IT professionals.

Unlike an online bookstore, Safari lets subscribers:

---Conduct searches across all of the technical books in the Safari library - more than 1,000 in all. Zero in on answers to time critical questions in a matter of seconds.

---Read the books on your Bookshelf from cover to cover. Or, simply flip to the page you need.

---Browse books by category. With Safari researching any topic is a snap. From XML, to database to .Net, you'll find your answer in Safari.

The Safari Bookshelf — for when you've absolutely got to have it now!

Targeted Customers

Without a doubt, anyone with any degree of computer interest should seriously consider investing in this super new service. For those with minimal needs in information technology books, you will find the Safari Bookshelf a wise investment. For information technology professionals heavily engaged in computer work all the time, the Safari Bookshelf is a definite investment that should be considered as essential an investment as is the hardware and software necessary to keep their networks running well. The reasonable price structure for this super service makes it nearly a no-brainer decision to add the Safari Bookshelf to the required toolkit of any information technology team of professionals.

Students working on computer related degrees, and especially those preparing for Microsoft, Novell, Cisco, or other vendor certification will also find the Safari Bookshelf a super additional resource that will greatly benefit their preparation for these various certifications. With Safari Bookshelf, you now no longer need to worry about having to find a retail or online provider of the desired title, as you can much more easily add the book to your own personal Safari Bookshelf. Yes, the Safari Bookshelf is very likely to have the book you need that will assist you in preparing for your certification exams.

Price

You can get your first 14 days on Safari FREE.

Safari is an electronic reference library that lets you search hundreds of best-selling technical books from O'Reilly and the best of the rest, including Addison-Wesley, New Riders, and Peachpit Press.

Signing up to get the first 14 days of your subscription for free is easy. Just complete the required information and Safari Tech Books Online will send you an email that includes your unique user name and password.

When your free period ends, your subscription will continue at the current level of $14.99 per month for 10 slots. Alternative subscription levels are also available.

The fees vary, depending on the number of slots you wish to reserve for books you wish to access online. The maximum is 30 slots for an annual fee of about $330.00. For most persons, the individual charge may be just what they need, but for those IS folks in corporate settings, I strongly urge you to seriously setting up a corporate account so you can maximize the number of slots for your team.

When you consider what you would pay if you separately purchased each of the many books you can access online via the Safari service, you will quickly see how cost effective is the Safari pricing structure. For companies with many IS folks who are needing access to many computer books all the time, the Safari service becomes a reasonable investment in these vital resources.

Here is how the Safari price structure breaks down.

Starter - 5 slot Bookshelf - $9.99 per month, $109.99 per year

Small - 10 slot Bookshelf - $14.99 per month, $159.99 per year

Medium - 20 slot Bookshelf - $24.99 per month, $269.99 per year

Large - 30 slot Bookshelf - $29.99 per month, $329.99 per year

I think most readers in corporate settings will quickly see the need to set up the large bookshelf at the annual fee. Also, once you set up a desired pricing structure, and you later wish to add more books, you will be prompted to either delete a book from your bookshelf, or upgrade your service. The annual and monthly fee that you set will also be automatically renewed at the end of your subscription time frame.

You can even set up a 30-trial period for a group of 5 or more users in your team, so more staff can get acquainted with the service and realize the benefits of the program.

How It Works

More than 70% of the books found in Safari Tech Books Online were published in the year 2000 or later. Because most of the books come from the "owner imprints," often times books appear in Safari on or before their print publication dates. This helps you keep ahead of the ever-changing technology curve.

When you are in the heat of problem solving you don't have time to sort through meaningless unrelated search results that you might get on the Web at large. Safari's powerful search engine and advanced search features give you precise search results that help answer your question fast. You can search more than twenty categories and multiple subcategories.

Getting started with a Safari subscription is easy. You first choose a bookshelf size (S/M/L or Starter), fill in your billing information, and once you have logged in you can begin to browse through the books or search for a specific topic.

As a subscriber to Safari, you have the ability to search across the entire Safari library at all times. Search results are rendered in two different ways, depending on whether a book resides on your personal Bookshelf or not. For every book that resides on your Bookshelf you can see every word of that book from cover to cover. For all other books, you can browse or search in preview mode. Previews consist of the first few paragraphs of text. Preview as many sections as you like, as often as you like, before you decide whether to add it to your bookshelf.

When you find a search result in a book you like, simply add the corresponding book to your Bookshelf with one click. You can continue adding books until your Bookshelf is full, at which time you can upgrade to the next size Bookshelf, or swap in a new book for an older book. The only rule is that any given book needs to stay on your Bookshelf for 30 days before you are allowed to swap.

Safari Benefits

Save Time — No need to sift through piles of books, wait on overnight book shipments, or scrape together information from message boards and colleagues.

Eliminate Errors — Cut and paste code directly. Save time. Eliminate programming errors.

Save Money — Avoid costly delays that result from picking up erroneous code from unreliable sources. Safari searches titles from the publishers you have already grown to trust.

Stay Current — New books are added in conjunction with, or sometimes in advance of, their print publication dates. Safari helps you stay ahead of the rapidly changing technology curve.

How Many Books Can I Access?

During the first 14 days, Safari Tech Books Online entitles you to a 10-slot bookshelf at no charge. Most Safari books occupy a single slot on your bookshelf. In most cases, a 10-slot bookshelf equates to a 10-book bookshelf. While you can search the entire Safari bookshelf, you will only be able to view the full-text content of the books you choose to put in your bookshelf. Some of the larger books will take up more than one slot.

You can access more books, but not for free. If you decide to upgrade during the free period, you'll be charged. You do need to cancel to avoid being billed.

Your free subscription ends after 14 days. At that time O'Reilly will automatically roll over your subscription from free to paid. To cancel your subscription, log in to Safari, click on the "Account" button, and follow the easy instructions from there.

Kudos to O'Reilly for Safari

Information technology professionals and all computer owners owe a great deal of gratitude to the super O'Reilly team who designed and developed this remarkable service. Some readers may think this Safari Bookshelf service is something similar to typical e-book services. However, the Safari Bookshelf is a far superior product that excels any existing e-book program.

With typical e-book transactions, you are usually buying access to a book that has been converted into a proprietary e-book format, such as the Acrobat E-Reader or Microsoft's E-Reader, and you download the entire book that then opens in your particular e-reader program. Once you have the e-book in this format, you find that you have the entire book and you can scroll through the entire book.

With the Safari Bookshelf, this e-book concept has been kicked up many notches into a far better approach that will best suit the needs of busy IT professionals. Once you add the book to your bookshelf, you find that you have electronic access to the entire book, but instead of having to load the entire book you load pages of the book as you need them. The process is entirely Web based and Web supported, which means as you move through the book clicking on the Next or Back links, you are opening new HTML files that have been set up to provide you this very fast, very practical access to the book.

Those of you with experience in designing Web pages probably have by now begun to realize the enormous work that has been invested in setting up this service, something that I think is phenomenal and amazing. O'Reilly Safari Bookshelf professionals have invested literally hundreds and hundreds of man hours designing this service, setting up the very user friendly Web interface, and developing the very easy to use search engine that allows you to search through a book for key content. I can only imagine the massive amount of time and hard work that was required to convert the print material into these electronically accessible files. I am in awe of the tons of hard work by the many highly skilled, very bright people with O'Reilly who design, maintain, and continue to expand this very remarkable service.

So, it's a tip of the hat to all the very impressive O'Reilly folks working with this important, valuable Safari Bookshelf service!

About O'Reilly

O'Reilly & Associates is the premier information source for leading-edge computer technologies. The company's books, conferences, and web sites bring to light the knowledge of technology innovators. O'Reilly books, known for the animals on their covers, occupy a treasured place on the shelves of the developers building the next generation of software. O'Reilly conferences and summits bring alpha geeks and forward-thinking business leaders together to shape the revolutionary ideas that spark new industries. From the Internet to XML, open source, .NET, Java, and web services, O'Reilly puts technologies on the map.

O'Reilly has been in business since 1978, originally as a technical writing consulting company. In 1984, the company recognized the possibilities in open systems and started retaining rights to manuals they created for Unix vendors. The thought at the time was simply to license the books to other vendors, but in the second half of 1985, a sudden slowdown in their consulting business led them to try publishing some of their material as independent books.

Their first titles were really more pamphlets than books--an average of 70 pages. They called them Nutshell Handbooks, because they were trying to get down to the basics, just what you need to know, in as few pages as possible. The first books were well received, but their consulting business revived, so they kept on publishing "in the cracks," whenever any of their writers had downtime between projects. They did it because it was fun, not because they thought it would grow into the major business that it has become.

Then, in January of 1988, at the MIT X Conference, O'Reilly happened to show some drafts of the Glib manuals that they were preparing for two of their clients. They were mobbed! They had planned to license the books to vendors as documentation, but it quickly became clear that there was a huge market for them as standalone books. Soon, they realized that publishing was a far more interesting business than documentation consulting. They began to devote more and more resources to it, until publishing became the core of their business.

O'Reilly currently publishes more than 300 titles, employs over 300 people, and has offices in the US, Japan, France, Germany, the UK, Taiwan, and the People's Republic of China. Bookstores tell them that we are the most consistent computer book publisher: every book sells, and continues to sell.

The O'Reilly background in the computer business, rather than traditional publishing, has given them a very different approach than most computer book publishers. All of their editors are expected to get their hands dirty with the technology they publish. Many are former programmers, system administrators, technical writers, or practicing scientists, and all are expected to have written at least one successful book of their own. Because O'Reilly is close to the industry, they know what books are really needed, and they make sure they tell people what they really need to know.

As they have learned, customers don't want O'Reilly books. They want the information the books provide. I think that O'Reilly firmly believes this, as they have thrown out some of the assumptions that go into most books and documentation, including for example, that a book has to be a certain length. O'Reilly writes books that are as long as the subjects they cover, ranging from the 78-page CVS Pocket Reference to Practical UNIX and Internet Security, which weighs in at a thousand pages.

O'Reilly also feels free to editorialize about software. Their goal is to talk to you directly in their books, and if that means giving you hacks and workarounds to software problems, they will do it. If they have done their job, reading one of their books should be like having an experienced user by your side, passing on helpful hints whenever you get stuck.

O'Reilly books cannot possibly keep up with the pace of change in the software market. So, they frequently update their books, often making small changes every time they reprint a title. They also keep their print runs short, so they have the opportunity to revise every six months. One of their early books went through ten editions in less than five years. Many of the changes are in response to feedback from readers as well as software changes.

Contact Information

Marsee Henon
O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, California 95472
707-827-7000
707-827-7103
800-998-9938
FAX 707-829-0104
marsee@oreilly.com
safari.oreilly.com
www.oreilly.com