[kw-pm] Review: Safari

[Daniel R. Allen]

Safari Review - by Daniel Allen <da at coder.com>

Imagine you're walking down the street when a guy in a trench-coat
comes out of a dark alley and says, "Hey pal- wanna rent an animal
book?"

You say, "An O'Reilly book?  Cool.  What do you have?"

He opens his trenchcoat, and there's a list of 1,450 titles.  "You
gotcher Nutshell books, your Camel books, your Linux, Macintosh, and
OS X books...  And not only O'Reilly, but also Addison-Wesley, New
Riders, QUE, SAMS, Adobe Press, and Microsoft Press."

You are dubious.  "Why should I *rent* these books, when I can just
buy them from the bookstore?  What's the source?  What are the terms?
And what's in it for you, anyway?"

My job in this review is to play the part of the guy in the
trench-coat, and try and sell you, the computer-book purchaser and
user, on the idea of renting books via the net from O'Reilly.

I've been using a free trial of O'Reilly Safari for a few months, and
I think it is worth a good look for anybody who uses technical
computer books as part of their job, their education, or even out of
intellectual curiosity.

Starting at the beginning:

O'Reilly and The Pearson Technology Group (made up of Addison Wesley,
New Riders, and the other publishers listed above, among others) have
a book subscription service called "Safari," at safari.oreilly.com.
Subscribers to this service pay $10US per month for a "5-slot
bookshelf".  Larger bookshelves are available, such as $15/mo. for a
10-slot bookshelf.

You can add books from the 1,450 book catalog to your shelf at any
time; nearly all at a one-slot-per-book rate (1/2 slot for O'Reilly
Pocket Guides).  Books in your shelf have the full contents available
over the web, broken into sub-chapters and fully searchable. It's
somewhat like the interface for the O'Reilly CD Bookshelfs, but
without the CD.

What's the Catch?

There's always a catch, isn't there?  In this case, the biggest catch
is that you must keep a book on your shelf for 30 days.

You can keep books on your shelf as long as you like, beyond the
original 30 days.  A typical strategy would be to gradually fill your
bookshelf over the course of a few months, and weed out the less
useful ones after their first 30 days, whenever you want to add
something new.

In my experience, "bookshelf managing" was not as much of a trouble as
I expected it to be.  I expected to fill the slots faster than I did
(for reasons I'll go into below).  I expected it to be a bit annoying
to figure out whether I had free slots for the books I wanted to add.
Neither of these expectations came true, however.

Another possible annoyance is that if you remove a book or cancel your
subscription, the book is gone.  This is less of an issue for
information that "goes stale" such as with so many things
computer-related.  Further, if you do the math, on a 5-book shelf
($10/mo.) you are paying $2 per month for a book.  If you've bought it
on paper, you have probably paid at least $30, so you'd better have
referred to it at least once a month for 15 months for it to have been
worth it.

What's Safari like?

Generally, if you are OK with reading long blocks of text on a
web page, you should be comfortable with this service and its
interface.  A book's outline is always visible on the page, as is a
search function.  Hyperlinks (within the chapters and in the index)
directly link into the appropriate section, generally faster than
page-flipping.  Searches can be of books in your bookshelf, or
Safari-wide.

You can also print pages directly from the book (though you are
supposed to destroy printouts for books no longer in your shelf).
There are interface features that allow you to take notes (attached to
a page), and make bookmarks stored with your account, useful if you
switch computers a lot.  Of course, these notes only last as long as
the book is in your bookshelf.

Since everything is web-based, all of the information can be accessed
from anywhere, leading to the first situation this service makes a lot
of sense- for people on the go.  Such as students or professionals
with more than one desk.  Who wants to carry 5 books in their suitcase
or backpack when they have access to the web?

The content is the same high quality you generally expect from
O'Reilly and the other publishers; on avarage, higher than newsgroup,
web, and IRC communities where the content can vary widely from
excellent to awful. The books seem to have the latest (corrected)
printing, so copying-and-pasting code will generally work the first
time.  Additionally, the content comes with valuable *context*; which
is often missing from community-provided answers, where people often
supply technically correct answes with no supporting information with
the important "why".

The interface has a clean way to find out what is in your bookshelf,
whether you have notes and bookmarks in a book, when you can remove a
book, what searches you have done recently and what pages you've
looked at recently as well.

The experience of using Safari compares favorably to using a public
library for the same purpose.  Not one of the books I have browsed in
Safari were available in the Kitchener or Waterloo library systems,
even though Kitchener has an OK selection of older O'Reilly books.

If I had a company library with hundreds of IT books and an ongoing
book budget, I guess I'd be happy with that; but I do not.  Instead, I
will be happy with Safari.

What are the downsides?

The following people will probably not be satisfied with Safari:
- people who cannot put up with reading long texts on a monitor
- people who want to collect shelves of Animal Books as status symbols.
- those who do not have any book budgets at all

The search engine does not use Google, and I wish it did.  I admit
I've gotten spoiled; I don't know how Safari sorts the outputs, but
I've sometimes found it easier to google for a topic to find a book
title, then find the book within Safari.

Not all O'Reilly books are on Safari.  The first three books I looked
for were not availble; I was looking for a few older O'Reilly books
and one published this year.  I expect they use a populatity heuristic
to decide which books to publish first.  But this meant that my (less
popular) first choices weren't available, so I had more spaces to fill
than I expected.

On the bright side, two months later, two of the three books are
available ("Learning GNU Emacs" and "Sequence Analysis in a Nutshell")
and they seem to be steadily adding a few dozen O'Reilly books a month.

I haven't thoroughly researched the non-O'Reilly books, but a few
non-O'Reilly books I would really expect to see are also not
available.  To name names, "Code Complete" by O'Connell, from
Microsoft Press, and "The Mythical Man Month" by Brooks, from
Addison-Wesley press aren't available.  These are widely regarded as
fundimental books for software professionals, and since the publishers
are part of Safari, I'd expect to see these titles.

A philosophical problem with the service, which I can't blame O'Reilly
for, is that I simply don't have time to read as many books as I've
"subscribed to".  So the value is slightly diminished; and I get a bit
of the "you left the fridge door open" feeling.  However, this is
greatly over-shadowed by the utility.

Wrap-up:

I've added five books to my bookshelf and have leisurely browsed
through two of them; and I used third book to look up a solution to a
programming problem.  I expect to directly use one of the other two
books for work, and read the other one for fun.  I think I have gotten
much more than the $30US value I would've paid for this service ($15/mo.)

What if I'd bought the books new in retail?  I'd have paid
approximately $150US (with a reasonable discount).  Would I receive
$150 value out of these five books over the time they sat on my shelf?
I don't think I would have.

In contrast, if I'd only bought one of the books for approximately the
same $30, I would not have gained the benefits from the other two that
I've already browsed.

Taking a hard look at my technical bookshelves, I have too many books.
If I could sell six of them, at half the purchase price, for the
ability to use Safari for six months, I would do so.

By that calculation, if I subscribe to the 5-shelf bookshelf, look at
30 or 40 (or up to 60) books over a year, and save from buying four
books I didn't need to buy, I've come out ahead in the deal-- not only
money-wise, but learning-wise as well.