Safari Books Online 6.0: A Cloud Library as an alternate model for ebooks

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 133

There has been a lot of attention paid to ebooks lately, and for good reason. Electronic books are portable, searchable, and more affordable than print books. The web has accustomed readers to having the latest information at their fingertips; we all ask why books should be any less available "on demand."

Amazon’s Kindle has received the most mainstream attention (with new entries like Barnes & Noble's Nook making dedicated ebook readers into the latest competitive horse-race), but ebooks are taking off even faster on the iPhone and other smart phones. Ebooks are one of the most popular classes of iPhone application. Recent releases of O'Reilly ebooks as iPhone applications have even outsold the same books in print. Direct sales of the ebook bundles we offer from oreilly.com (PDF, epub, or mobi files) also exceed our direct sales of print books from the site.

Yet our most popular ebook offering by far is often not even thought of as an ebook. Safari Books Online is an online book and video subscription service, launched in partnership with the Pearson Technology Group in 2001. It contains more than 10,000 technical and business books and videos from more than 40 publishers. It has more than 15 million users (including the number of concurrent seats available through libraries and universities); it is now the second largest reseller of O’Reilly books, exceeded only by Amazon.com, and its revenue dwarfs our sales of downloadable ebooks. It's also the most affordable of our ebook offerings for those who are regular consumers of technical content. The average Safari Books Online subscriber uses at least seven books a month, and many use dozens (or even more), yet the monthly price (depending on the subscription plan) ranges from little more than the price of a single downloadable ebook to no greater than that of two or three.

Here’s the rub: most people thinking about ebooks are focused on creating an electronic recreation of print books, complete with downloadable files and devices that look and feel like books. This is a bit like pointing a camera at a stage play and concluding that was the essence of filmmaking!

At O’Reilly, we’ve tried to focus not on the form of the book but on the job that it does for our customers. It teaches, it informs, it entertains. How might electronic publishing help us to advance those aims? How might we create a more effective tool that would help our customers get their job done?

It was by asking ourselves those questions that we realized the advantages of an online library available by subscription. One of the best things about online technical books is the ability to search the full text of a book. How much better would it be to be able to search across thousands of books? Safari Books Online was our answer.

And it just got better. Safari Books Online 6.0, released yesterday, brings a new level of ease of use. It’s a complete, bottom-to-top revamping of the original service. The old UI was, to say the least, getting long in the tooth.

The new UI is slicker and faster, with the kind of drag-and-drop goodness that people expect from a modern web application. In addition, we’ve added some long-requested features, including:

Improved Interactivity -- With 6.0 you can make inline notes, in the actual text you are reading. You can dog-ear or bookmark specific pages. You can highlight text and associate it with notes. When you are done you can print those pages with both your highlights and notes on them. You can scroll non-stop through the pages of a book without any page refresh, or scan a block of pages in thumbnail view to spot the page you are looking for.

Personalized Folders - Rather than having thousands of books and videos organized by us in a single technology topic taxonomy, you can now put together your own organization, grouping books in the categories most useful to you. You can restrict searches to only the books you’ve chosen, and can search within the results of a saved search.

Collaboration - Even better, if you’re a corporate subscriber, you can share your categorization with other members of your company or workgroup. Not only can team members share folders, they can share book reviews, notes and highlights.

Smart Folders - New books, videos and articles are being added to Safari Books Online all the time. Searches saved as "smart folders" make it easy to keep up with the latest content in your area of interest. We have also improved our search user interface to allow you to search inside the book or in other books without leaving the page you are reading. Switch pages only when you find what you want.

As you can see, many of these features take advantage of the online medium in ways that aren’t possible with standalone ebooks. To be sure, there are times you want your own offline copy, and in Safari Books Online, you can indeed download books or chapters for offline use. But especially given the rise of the smartphone as an access device, the times when we are truly "offline" are becoming few and far between. The vision with which we started Safari, that of always-on access to a library of technical content, not just to individual ebooks, is now within reach. Safari Books Online can be used on a desktop or laptop computer or in the browser on a mobile phone. Everything is always in sync because your library is in the cloud.

An ebook cloud works the same way the web itself works. It provides ubiquitous access and shared experience.

Lessons Learned from the development of Safari Books Online

As I outlined above, Safari adopted a "cloud library" model rather than downloadable ebooks as its fundamental design metaphor. I thought it might be worthwhile to understand how we arrived at that decision, as well as some of the other lessons we’ve learned over what is now 22 years of ebook publishing experience. (O’Reilly published its first ebook, Unix in a Nutshell for Hypercard, back in 1987!) With that, a few reflections on lessons learned:

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Competition in the eBook Market

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 9

There's been a lot of buzz on forward-looking publisher mailing lists in the past few days about Robert Darnton's piece in the New York Review of Books, Google and the Future of Books. When it hit techmeme today, I thought it might be appropriate to share more broadly the comments I made on the Reading 2.0 list (links added, minor edits):

Darnton's piece is eloquent, insightful...and wrong. I loved his history of the idea of reading as a driver for the enlightenment and the dream of America, his evident love for the mission of the librarian, and his worried disdain for profiteers who limit that mission, but on the subject of the Google Book Search settlement stifling competition, he can't be paying attention to the fact that the electronic book marketplace is finally taking off!

There has never been more competition either in electronic books, or for books, in the broader electronic "republic of letters."

It is true, perhaps, in the narrow sense, that no other party will be able to do a mass digitization project on the scale of Google's - but that was already true. The barrier has always been the willingness to spend a lot of money for little return; the settlement doesn't change that.

Meanwhile, the settlement provides absolutely no barrier to publishers providing their own digital copies, and this is in fact happening. At O'Reilly, we are selling digital copies of all our books through subscription services like Safari Books Online (which also includes thousands of books from other publishers), as direct downloads from our web site in pdf, mobi, and epub formats, and through emerging ebook channels like Amazon's Kindle, Stanza, and the iPhone app store.

Safari is now O'Reilly's #2 channel, behind only Amazon. Meanwhile, in its first month of sales, our IPhone: The Missing Manual, released as a standalone iPhone app (really, a bundle with Stanza) reached sales levels that would have made it the #1 computer book, beating all print computer books reported by Bookscan in that same period.)

In short, there's a strong economic motive for publishers to release digital editions of their books, and to treat Google Books as only one possible channel. If the revenues generated by GBS (via services enabled by the settlement) are significant, new titles will be released to that channel by publishers. But there's no reason why publishers will release their titles through GBS in despite of other possible channels. Google will have to prove its value, just like any other reseller.

Frankly, I'd be far more worried about Darnton's wished-for utopia, in which the government had funded the equivalent, mandating that all publishers participate. That might well have nipped the competitive ebook landscape in the bud.

As it is, we see lots of different competing approaches to bootstrapping this market. I'd say it's opening up very nicely!

Meanwhile, the republic of letters, and the republic of ideas, has moved beyond books in substantial ways, into dialogs such as we have here, into blogs, onto web sites and other information services. It's alive and well! By the time I'm done, I imagine that my email correspondence and online writings would fill fifty volumes, just as did the physical letter writings of Franklin, Jefferson, Rousseau and Voltaire that Darnton rhapsodizes. If only my writings (and those of hundreds of millions of others) were so worth preserving!

This is not to say that there aren't serious concerns with the Google Book settlement. James Grimmelman wrote a fantastic piece back in November, Principles and Recommendations for the Google Book Search Settlement, that should be required reading for anyone trying to understand just what the settlement means and how it could be improved upon:

Summary of principles and recommendations (hyperlinks take you back to the section of the document that discusses them)

• P0: The settlement should be approved
  • R0: Approve the settlement.
• P1: The Registry poses an antitrust problem
  • R1: Put library and reader representatives on the Registry’s board.
  • R2: Require the Registry to sign an antitrust consent decree.
  • R3: Give future authors and publishers the same deal as current ones.
• P2 If it didn’t already, Google poses an antitrust problem
  • R4: Strike the most-favored-nations clause.
  • R5: Allow Google’s competitors to offer the same services the settlement allows Google to offer, with the same obligations.
  • R6: Authorize the Registry to negotiate on copyright owners’ behalf with Google’s competitors.
• P3: Enforce reasonable consumer-protection standards
  • R7: Prohibit Google from price discriminating in individual book sales.
  • R8: Insert strict guarantees of reader privacy.
  • R9: Protect readers from being asked to waive their rights as a condition of access.
• P4: Make the public goods generated by the project truly public
  • R10: Require that Google’s database of in-print/out-of-print information be made public.
  • R11: Require that the Registry’s database of copyright owner information be made public.
  • R12: Require the use of standard APIs, open data formats, and (for metadata) unrestricted access.
• P5: Require accountability and transparency
  • R13: Require that Google inform the public when it excludes a book for editorial reasons.
  • R14: Tighten up the definition of “non-editorial reasons” for excluding a book.
  • R15: Allow any institution ready, willing, and able to participate in scanning books to do so.

I'd add to those recommendations one more: book search should work like web search. That is, because of the powers given to Google under this settlement, Google searches should be required to present and rank results from all electronic copies of books that are available online, not giving preference to the copies in their own archives.

I stand by my assertion that Google Book Search is good for publishers, authors, and the reading public. While the settlement does give Google what seems to be unprecedented power over the market for out-of-print but not out-of-copyright books, I'm not sure that market matters all that much to publishers, and it matters a LOT to the public. And in any event:

1. If there is significant value to be derived from these "under copyright but out of print" books, GBS will bring that value to the surface, and will then get those works on the radar of those who own those rights (if those rightsholders still exist.) Those parties can then start to exploit those rights through other available channels.

2. If there is no rights-holder to be found, we're no worse off than we were before, since there was no way of recognizing that economic value anyway. So the GBS settlement is worse, say, than just reducing the length of copyright, or requiring regular re-registration to keep books in copyright, letting those that are orphaned go more quickly into the public domain, but it's not worse than the situation before the settlement, in which no one but google was spending the money to digitize these works anyway.

There are no fewer incentives to digitize valuable works than there were before, and one can argue that GBS will bring to light works that will then become available to competing digital channels in ways that wouldn't have happened without the settlement.

O'Reilly Radar, other O'Reilly efforts win JOLT awards at SD West

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 2

The SD West conference and expo held its awards ceremony this evening. O'Reilly was a finalist for five products or services and won awards for all five entries. Radar took the top award in its category (Web sites) and Beautiful Code in its category (General Books). The Myths of Innovation, Head First SQL, and Safari Books Online won awards at the second tier (productivity awards).