Introduction

For the last 15 years or so, I’ve been accumulating computer books in my home and office. Every year, updated versions of these books come out, and for some books, I’ve had to purchase 5 new revisions of these titles. Not only are books heavy and expensive, they also take up a lot of room in an office, home, dorm, etc., aren’t portable, and consume trees! In most cases, I find myself buying a 700 page book just to read 60 pages of content that I really need. That’s a lot of wasted paper and money.

It takes approximately 15 trees (with a diameter of 8 inches) to make 188 books (assuming no recycled materials are used, and each book is about 500 pages). In other words approximately 1 tree produces 12.5 books. So if you don’t buy 12.5 books a year, you are roughly saving 1 tree. Multiply that by the number of folks using Safari Books Online, and 100’s of 1000’s of trees are being saved every year. If you sign up for Safari, then we can increase that number .

For the longest time, I was averse to reading books on computer screens; despite its weight, cost, and environmental impact, the paper form factor was just easier on the eyes. However, with today’s high resolution displays on laptops and desktops, and the prevalence of using laptops everywhere, I now prefer to read a book on my computer! Plus, I can copy and paste code, and whatever other content that I want to save or use. I can carry hundreds of books in my laptop, and the laptop only weighs about 4-5 lbs . These are all things I can’t do with books.

So, I went searching for a solution, and found it in Safari Books Online. Safari carries titles from all the major technical book publishers, such as O’Reilly, Addison-Wesley, Cisco Press, Microsoft Press, IBM Press, John Wiley and Sons, Macromedia, Adobe Press, Peachpit Press, etc.

Safari allows me to read individual sections and chapters from books online, using just an Internet connection and web browser. It also allows me to download these chapters as PDFs on my computer. Going green never felt better, and lighter . If you are interested in going paperless and finding a comprehensive online technical library for your development needs, then you will the Safari service and this review useful. In this review I will cover what Safari is, what the user experience is like, and what subscription options are available, and give you a sneak peak behind the scenes of what makes Safari itself tick.

What is it?

Safari works much like a music subscription service, for a flat monthly fee, you can have access to books on the web. You can even download content on the site as PDF documents to view offline (when you’re in a plane or traveling without Internet access). Depending on your subscription, you can have access to all the books or a limited number of books at a time. You can also get access to books as they are being written – which is a great thing to have, if your job requires you to be on the bleeding edge of certain technologies!

Safari Online is a website (http://my.safaribooksonline.com) where you can access:

Books – Safari has a massive collection of technology books from all the world’s leading publishers. You can view these books as XHTML (HTML view), and/or JPEG images (Print fidelity view). Nearly every book on Safari is available as a PDF download.

Rough Cuts – Rough Cuts are books that are currently being written that you have access to on Safari. Rough Cuts allows a discussion to take place between content authors, content editors, and the reader. Readers can get their voices heard and shape the content of the books being written by communicating with authors and editors, at an all important time BEFORE the book goes to print, at which point it’s largely immutable (until the next revision). Only Safari allows authors, editors, and readers come together and collaborate on a book to make it even better. Rough Cuts also allows developers stay up to date on emerging technologies enabling them to do their jobs better.

Instructional Videos – A majority of the video content, from Lynda.com, is not targeted at Java programmers, but at creative professionals (Photoshop, CS3, Dreamweaver, etc). However, there are some excellent technical videos that are extremely useful, and Safari is continuously adding new technical videos, so keep an eye out for them.

Custom RSS feeds – you can stay up to date on new books available on Safari, all books available in your favorite categories or printed by your favorite publishers.

Related Articles and Safari Guides – Related Articles and Safari Guides are additional resources Safari provides its readers. When performing a search on Safari, related articles from websites like Sun Developer Network and IBM developerWorks will show up in your search results. These materials aren’t always relevant to your search and they can be found for free using Google searches. Also, short tips and book recommendations based on your search criteria will show up in most search results. They are called Safari Guides and may be helpful to point you in the right direction if you aren’t able to locate the book you are looking for or if you know very little about the subject you are searching for.

Short Cuts – Short Cuts are focused documents similar to tutorials on specific technologies. They add little value because they are out of date, with most of them being from year 2006.

How to use Safari Books Online – "Learning Paths"

When developers are looking for a solution to a technical problem and need to learn a new technology to solve this problem, they tend to read a few chapters from many different books rather than consuming a few books cover to cover. This collection of chapters from disparate books that a developer uses represents a “learning path”. Safari’s large repository of books and chapter-based approach allow developers to follow the learning paths that are most effective for them. These individual learning paths make consuming Safari content much easier and more effective than traditional eBooks, which require you to purchase entire books at a time and do not have content broken up in chapters and sections (that can easily be bookmarked, annotated, and downloaded).

Learning Paths with a chapter-based approach When reading any book online, Safari allows you to easily navigate through a book by chapter and section to create your own learning path. When you find chapter you like, if you hold your mouse over the PDF icon, you have the option of downloading the chapter as a PDF. Once you download the information you need from this book, then, you can move on to the next book and only keep the information that is useful to you without having to purchase an entire eBook. Saving paper and going green! Save a tree – use Safari Books Online! Think of how unnecessary it is to kill so many trees to make books that you will only read a few chapters from, and then will soon be outdated? Why not go green and download the chapter(s) you really need using Safari, or read it online – and when a new edition comes out, you can just read them online or download them again and always have access to them on your computer.

How Safari Books Online subscriptions work

There are 2 different subscription options: The Bookshelf or The Library. Here’s more information on each:

Safari Bookshelf – This subscription limits the number of books that you can access at any given time and books must be in your bookshelf for you to access them. A Bookshelf subscription is available with 10, 20, or 30 bookshelf slots and you pay a flat monthly fee depending on the size of your bookshelf. With this account you cannot access videos or Rough Cuts. Chapters of books can be purchased with download tokens and saved on your computer as a PDF.

Safari Library – The “all you can eat” option. You have access to all types of content on Safari – books, videos, Rough Cuts, Short Cuts, and How To’s. (For more information on Safari How to’s see section below called Safari Labs). Chapters of books can be purchased with download tokens and saved on your computer as a PDF. You have unlimited access to read all Rough Cuts online. Downloading the book version or purchasing the print version of a Rough Cut requires an additional transaction. With both subscription options, bookmarks to specific sections of books, and notes on specific pages of books can be created and managed through the “My Safari” page.

Safari Bookshelf subscription

A Safari Bookshelf account requires books to be in “My Bookshelf” in order to access them. The bookshelf sizes range from 5 to 30 slots, and a book must remain in a slot for 30 days before swapping with another book. Most Safari titles take up one slot on your bookshelf, but some may take up more. Safari Bookshelf allows you to download chapters of books in PDF format so you can take them with you on your laptop and have access to Safari content when you are traveling. Each month, you will receive an allocation of five “download tokens,” and generally one download token allows you to download one chapter as a PDF, but some publishers may require more. Additional download tokens can be purchased, and each token expires after 90 days.

This is extremely useful and great for travel or when you want to read but don’t have an Internet connection. The download tokens can run out fast, so you may need extra. The number of used and available tokens is managed in the My Download Tokens pane on the My Safari Page. Safari Bookshelf subscriptions also give you discounts on print book purchases made through Safari. To sign up for a free trial of Safari Books Online, go here: http://my.safaribooksonline.com/promo.

Safari Library subscription

This is the premium subscription option which allows you to read any book online, as well as access video content. There is no such thing as a “bookshelf” with the Library subscription; you have unfettered access to the entire catalog of content. There are some excellent technical videos that are extremely useful, and Safari is continuously adding new technical videos, so keep an eye out for them. With this subscription, “My Bookshelf” is replaced with “My Favorites”, a list onto which you can place links to books for convenience (not just chapters from books, and notes, which you can still get on the “My Safari” page). Just like Safari Bookshelf, the Safari Library gives you have the ability to download chapters of books in PDF format. Each month you will receive an allocation of five “download tokens,” and generally one download token allows you to download one chapter as a PDF. Additional download tokens can be purchased, and each token expires after 90 days.

One of the most exciting benefits to this premium account is that it allows you to view an unlimited number of Rough Cuts online. Rough Cuts are pre-production books and a unique value-add that only Safari provides. You can’t get access to book as they are being written from anywhere else! Unless you are really strapped for cash, the Library subscription is the way to go, you can read and download anything on the site, and you can read all Rough Cuts online.

All Safari subscriptions give you access to Short Cuts, Related Articles, and Safari Guides. Short Cuts are defined by Safari as focused tutorials on specific technologies, but they add little value because they are out of date, and they take up space in your bookshelf if you don’t have a Safari Library subscription. To sign up for a free trial of Safari Books Online, go here: http://my.safaribooksonline.com/promo.

Navigating the website – how it works

There are just a few key ‘navigation metaphors’ that are implemented in the Safari Web2.0 site. They are really quite simple, and they exist to allow a reader to find what they are looking for really quickly, whether they know exactly what they are looking for or not.

Search	The navigation sidebar is the primary tool for locating content on Safari. You can search for content using the search box on the top of the side bar, if you know what content you are looking for roughly. This will do a full text search in the content of all the books, Short Cuts, Rough Cuts, videos, related articles, and Safari guides that are available on the site depending on your level of subscription.
Browse	Using the navigation sidebar, you can browse by content category; if you aren’t sure of the title you’re looking for, but want to drive your search by taxonomy of the content. There are a lot of great categories that are well organized, and make it relatively easy to find what you are looking for based on what topic you are interested in. You can also use the Quick Links pull down menu that will bring you straight to entire list of Rough Cuts, Short Cuts, and Videos available.
Bookmark, Annotate	Once you’ve located something, you can save a bookmark to it, by simply adding the URI of the page to your browser bookmarks, delicious, etc. Alternatively, you can add bookmarks on the site itself – by adding the book or chapter you are looking at to the site bookmarks – you can then access these saved books or bookmarks from your “My Favorites” page or “My Safari” page. You can also add notes to the chapter/page that you are viewing, and these notes also show up in the “My Safari” page. Notes can be private or public – so other users can benefit from them.
Syndicate	You can create RSS feeds for specific content categories and titles that you’re interested in using the “Tools” section. This becomes a really simple and powerful way of keeping up to date with titles and other content that you are interested in, e.g., you can find out when a new title or rough cut is published by referring to the custom RSS feed that you’ve created.

Searching for content using the navigation sidebar

Here is an example of how to perform a search for a book or video:

Searching for a specific type of content: Using the sidebar you can use the search box to specify whether you want to search the entire site, books/videos, code fragments, author etc. You can also perform a search within your favorites.

Search results: Performing a site-wide search for “java” will return a list of results by content type: books, videos, related articles, and Safari guides.

Browsing by Category and Quick Links using the Navigation Sidebar

Browsing by category : It’s possible to navigate through the content using categories that are defined on the site. So you can find content that relates to certain subject areas. For e.g.: you can pick a category like Databases, and then you will be presented with nested subcategories like: Access, Administration, Berkeley DB, etc. You can keep drilling down the categories until you get to what you want. This is a great way to get an idea of all the content within the category you are interested in, that you may not even think to search for.

Using Quick Links: You can jump straight to collections of specific types of content like Videos, Rough Cuts, etc. and see the entire list of these types of content. For e.g., you select the Rough Cuts category using the quick links menu, there is no way to perform a search within the category, you will have to scroll through the entire list of Rough Cuts. Quick Links popular categories: You can also get to popular categories like: .NET, Java, JavaScript, XML, etc. This saves you from having to drill down and find the category you are looking for and using these popular ones.

Creating Bookmarks, Notes and Favorites

Bookmarks, notes, and favorites are another great way to navigate the website. Let’s say you have found a book and are reading it, and need to bookmark a section to reference later, you can add a bookmark that will not only show up the next time you access the book, but will also show up in “My Safari” for you to go straight to the next time. Or, if while reading a book, you want to make a note about a particular section, you can add a note and it will show in that section every time you access it, as well as in “My Safari”. These notes can be private, or you can make them public for all Safari users. If you have a Library account, let’s say you perform a search and find 10 books that look interesting to you, you can add all 10 to your favorites and later come back to read them. If you have a bookshelf account, you have to add the 10 books to your bookshelf, and then add bookmarks and notes to the books in your bookshelf. This makes it really easy to keep track of your favorite books, chapters, and pages and easily start where you left off. (See section below called, My Safari, for more details).

Safari Tools – Creating Customized RSS Feeds

Using the RSS Generator, you can create custom RSS feeds to keep track of the content most important to you. This RSS feed will allow you to always stay current on and go directly to the new books you are looking for without even searching for them. Here is how to create an RSS feed for all new programming books: Pick a category, publisher, and type. You can create a customized RSS feed based on category, by publisher, and type of book and an RSS feed is automatically generated for you.

The RSS feed is automatically generated. Then, simply copy and paste the generated URL to your RSS reader.

"My Safari" – Your Homepage

My Safari is your homepage and allows you to manage all of your Safari content, so you will want to head to this section to manage your day-to-day use of Safari. My Safari shows you things like:

	My Favorites Add books you are interested in and their related notes and bookmarks will also show up. My Downloaded Tokens Token management – this shows you how many tokens you have remaining and when they will expire.
	My Downloads This will show which chapters of books you have downloaded using your tokens.
	My Recent Searches and My Recent Views: This shows you a list of all the searches and viewed content you have performed in your previous sessions. This will help you remember the type of books or category you were looking at the last time you were logged in. It’s a great place to go if you want to start where you left off.
	My Bookmarks: Sections of books can be bookmarked. My Bookmarks will show you the date you made the bookmark, the section you bookmarked and the respective title – all in one place. They are all hyperlinked so you can click on them from here and go straight back to them. You can, of course, choose to keep your bookmarks on your web browser, but using Safari’s bookmarks allows everything from your previous sessions to be stored in one place.
	My Notes: Instead of polluting the edges of your monitor with sticky notes, you can keep all your notes together in the My Safari section. It will indicate the date you made the note, whether the note is public or private, and show you the book and section the note was made in, and of course it is also hyperlinked for quick access.

My Account

The “My Account” section allows you to make changes to the type of subscription you have and manage credit card and account information, etc. If you want to upgrade or downgrade your subscription, you can do it here. Also, if you run out of download tokens, they can be purchased here.

 

Safari Labs – User Feedback

This is a section of the site that is dedicated to Beta testing new types of services and features to make Safari Books Online better and easier to use. This is the section where Safari encourages user feedback, so feel free to tell them what you think.

Currently, Safari has a Beta version of “How Tos” available to Safari Library subscribers:

How Tos Beta:

How Tos are books written in a tutorial or how-to style. The content comes from Hacks series (O’Reilly Media), the Visual QuickStart Guide series (Peachpit Press), the Cookbook series (O’Reilly Media), and the Sams Teach Yourself series (SAMS). There are currently over 70,000 How Tos.

Insider’s look… the technology & story behind Safari

I had a chance to interview one of the Safari Books Online co-founders John Chodacki to get more of an insight into how Safari Books Online itself came about, and how it’s built.

History

Safari was started in the late 90s by O’Reilly. Initially all the O’Reilly titles in print were converted to digital format, and a custom repository and web application were created to deliver this print content online. All the print content was converted by the publisher to DocBook XML format and then made available for delivery online, through the web (learn more about DocBook here). The availability of content in XML format allowed it to be searchable. Additionally, since all the content was tagged, it was possible to do advanced searching in the body of the content itself, and organize the content in various ways. In the past 7 years, more publishers joined the ranks of O’Reilly, including Pearson, Microsoft Press, etc. Today most publishers provide a DocBook XML format of their titles as books are being written; publishers have realized that the DocBook XML format allows them to repurpose the content more effectively, since print publication is not the only way to release this content for consumption to their customers. Safari is the clear leader in this space, creating the first online repository of print content, and a user experience to deliver this to their subscribers over the web. Today, Safari sells their subscriptions direct to the consumer, to public libraries, and to enterprises.

Technology

Safari Books Online consists of a repository that holds all the DocBook XML content, and a web application that delivers the end user experience to subscribers. All the technology is built using .NET and SQL Server. The repository and web applications are all created and maintained (since inception) by Bureau van Dijk, a Belgian electronic publishing IT provider. They have about 12 engineering resources who’ve worked on the technology since the beginning. The entire web application is written in .NET, and it doesn’t use any plugins (FlashPaper, PDF reader, etc). All the JavaScript for the web application is written by BvDEP. Here’s a diagram representing the architecture of the Safari Books Online service itself:

Web app – Print fidelity and HTML view

When you browse the content on Safari Online, there are really 3 ways of consuming the books:

1. Print Fidelity View – in this view you can see the tiled JPEGs that are rendered to look exactly like the content looks like when printed on paper. This view is useful for content that is very visual in nature. Turning it into XHTML makes it unreadable, since the visual layout of images is important for the content to look “right”. The web app generates its own JavaScript that’s used to create the web user experience, and it’s quite snappy and works very well!
2. HTML View- in this view an XHTML version of the content can be seen in the browser. You can copy and paste the content since its plain XHTML. This view doesn’t look much like the printed content.
3. PDF View – the content is just rendered to PDF, which is provided as a download link.

All content can be downloaded as PDF for offline viewing. However, depending on the content (visual or textual) it might be provided in one or both of the following formats – Print Fidelity and HTML. Some content like the O’Reilly Head First series can’t really be turned into HTML view, so only Print Fidelity view is provided. If you were wondering why viewing formats aren’t available sometimes, this is why .

Future direction

Currently Safari Books Online has a vast number of technical titles that developers are interested in, on any number of technologies. In the future, Safari has plans to expand its content to creative professionals and business users. Currently a lot of video content for creative professionals is being added. Additionally, there are plans to focus on the user experience to improve the communications between readers and authors & editors, while books are being written, i.e., Rough Cuts. These are all really exciting areas that Safari is expanding into and we can’t wait to see it happen!

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 7:09 pm and is filed under Reviews, Services. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.