O'Reilly & Associates is pleased to announce the formation of a joint venture with the Pearson Technology Group, a division of Pearson Education, to produce Safari Tech Books Online.
This joint venture brings O'Reilly into a partnership with the largest publisher of premium technology content in the world. Pearson's imprints--Addison Wesley Professional, New Riders, Prentice Hall PTR, Peachpit Press, Macromedia Press, and Adobe Press--are our most highly respected competitors. We know that even loyal readers like you consult other publishers' books from time to time. The Safari joint venture means that now you can access books online from O'Reilly and the "Best of the Rest."
With this alliance, Safari Tech Books Online, originally initiated and developed by O'Reilly, goes a long way toward becoming a standard platform for delivery of premium technology information online. This isn't just another clumsy e-book initiative. What we've built is a comprehensive online reference service to meet the critical and varied needs of IT professionals.
"Safari is fundamentally different from e-books," says Jon Udell, Safari architect, Byte magazine columnist, and author of Practical Internet Groupware. "In the e-book model, typically, you buy a book, own it forever, and use it offline. With the Safari Tech Books Online, you subscribe to an information service. You rent the content of the books, and you use them online. But you're not committed to any fixed selection of books. Think of your subscription as bandwidth. You can pay a little for a skinny pipe into Safari, or more for a fat pipe. What runs through the pipe is up to you." Jon also points out a key advantage of the Safari service: "Books in printed form don't support intensive, goal-directed research as effectively as they can in electronic form. Safari Tech Books Online aims to change that."
In this Interview with Safari Architect Jon Udell, which preceded O'Reilly's joint venture with Pearson, we asked Jon to describe how our innovative, subscription-based, online book service, Safari, works.
While there have been other Web-based technical book initiatives, they offered little value to publishers and authors, and as a result, they had only a limited selection of less-desirable titles. Safari Tech Books Online is a publisher-driven solution, not another faulty content-aggregation model developed by a shaky Web start-up. The publishers participating in the Safari service are committed to making it an integral part of their publishing platform, meaning that you'll have access to all of the best books.
Subscribers to Safari Tech Books Online can get five books for as little as $9.95 per month and can swap all or part of their subscription for other books monthly. See safari.oreilly.com for more details. You can also search all the books in the service, not just those in your subscription, and find out if they have information relevant to your needs. There are now over 125 O'Reilly titles in the service. These books are identified in our online catalog. The joint venture adds hundreds more of Pearson's best titles. Both publishing partners will be adding new content weekly, and some books will begin to appear on the Safari service even before they are available in print.
A drawing for valuable prizes kicks off Safari. The Grand Prize is a $1,000 technical book shopping spree (the winner picks from all participating publishers' print books) and a pass to an O'Reilly Conference of the winner's choice. There are two Second Prizes ($250 worth of O'Reilly books), and three Third Prizes ($100 worth of O'Reilly books). Details are available at safari.oreilly.com.
The information you need is just a few clicks away whenever you need it most--anytime, day or night. That's why we continue to call it: "Instant Gratification in a Nutshell."
Copyright © 2009 O'Reilly Media, Inc.