Pick the Hat to Fit the Head, originally published in O'Reilly's Fall 2004 Catalog The results of a new study on how people use our Safari Bookshelf service reminded me of the old saying: you pick the hat to fit the head. For some users, Safari is an online book: they read chapters or entire books online. But the majority use Safari in addition to (rather than instead of) print books, and they use it differently depending on the task at hand. They search for answers on the fly, find and copy code, and bookmark often-used reference material. And nearly half use Safari to preview books before they buy them. So why do we keep publishing a paper catalog? Because I'm willing to bet that a good number of those who shop via Safari also settle down with this catalog when it arrives in the mail (see Safari subscriber Liz Donaldson's letter about the O'Reilly "wish book"). It's a handy format for browsing, and it works even when you're away from your computer, whether you're on the train or sipping coffee. Larry Wall once said, "Information wants to be valuable," and the form in which information's presented contributes to that value. The Safari APIThe web sparked new ways to create value with the information in our books. From the start, we conceived of Safari as an evolving set of services that drew from our database of book content. The Safari Bookshelf was our first implementation, and we're now launching the second generation of Safari services.
Opening up the Safari API (Application Programming Interface) is an important step in the process. The interesting services built on top of eBay and Amazon by independent developers are evidence of the power of making APIs public. We can't wait to see what will come out of the new Safari Affiliate Program, which lets developers integrate Safari content into web sites and IDEs (Integrated Development Environments). There's already an Eclipse plugin for Safari, and one for NetBeans is under development. SafariU
But that's not all. We realized that the SafariU functionality is also a great way for corporations to create custom documentation sets for their internal users. And we're working with a number of non-profits to create custom documentation sets for users in developing countries--a networking starter kit, for example. The flexibility of the API allows us to easily build new "applications" of Safari--and we're sure we're going to get lots of new ideas from developers playing with the public API. Stay tuned! New Distribution Partner
Take a look at SitePoint's books, plus O'Reilly's new titles and the offerings from No Starch, Paraglyph, the Pragmatic Programmers, and Syngress. Our "wish book" may not be as thick as the old Sears catalog, but as you look through it, we hope you'll find what you need and dream about what you want. Tim O'Reilly |
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