Looking to control the distribution of their content online, Pearson and O'Reilly Associates, both major publishers of computer, technical and business information, have teamed up to launch Safari Books Online, an online reference resource.
SafariBooksOnline.com is reminiscent of Books24x7.com , which also offers corporations online access to the full-text of technical reference works through individual accounts tailored to the information needs of each employee.
But Sean Devine, managing director of Safari, told PW that Safari is a little different. The site, which was launched in September, offers only titles published by Pearson (and such Pearson units as Que, Addison Wesley, Cisco and Prentice Hall) or those published by computer book publisher O'Reilly & Associates.
Devine told PW that both publishers wanted to avoid "being aggregated with the content of their competitors," and can now offer "exclusive access" to their newest titles through their own online channel. Devine also said that the two publishers, which have offered their content through Books24x7.com in the past, were no longer providing Books24x7 with frontlist titles.
The site offers subscription models for businesses and for the individual consumer. Businesses are offered a "bookshelf" of anywhere from five to 100 titles that can be shared by a defined number of employees within the organization. Individual consumers can get access to a basic library of any five books for $9.99 a month. Consumers can cut and paste, annotate and bookmark their texts.
Consumers who want the print edition can click and buy the book directly through the Pearson or O'Reilly Web sites, rather than from a third party online retailer.
