The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive-Ass Slippers

Wed, 06 Sep 2006

On Safari

I subscribed to O'Reilly's Safari online library today, or rather convinced work to pay for it (woot). I thought about subscribing when it was first released (in 2001, apparently), but baulked because it "only" contained the O'Reilly titles. Now there are stacks more books available, about 650 as of May 2006.

Tim O'Reilly makes some interesting comparison with physical book sales in a blog post on O'Reilly Radar. (Warning: link contains references to wanky long tail stuff). According to the Safari logs, the graph of page views vs book sales is a lot flatter and longer for Safari, and actually tips up at the end of the tail.

Australia, and especially Canberra, doesn't have very many good technical bookstores compared to a Borders or Barnes & Noble in a decent sized US city so local book browsing is limited to the current new releases of .NET, VB and Cisco training books. Oh yeah, Safari's also searchable. Neat.