Safari Books Online Goes Mobile

Allen Noren
February 9, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (9) | Listen

Tools of Change for Publishing Conference

Like much of the publishing world, I'm eager to hear about Amazon's latest version of the Kindle. But that's not the only news today. I'm sitting here at TOC and talking to John Chodacki from Safari Books Online and, with a smile on his face, he's showing me beta version of m.safaribooksonline.com. (In full disclosure, Safari is a joint venture between O'Reilly and Pearson.)

The smile is well deserved. It looks great, it's fast, and I love the stripped-down navigation and lack of clutter. It's got a couple of bugs, and I don't like that I can't read our highly designed Head First books, but it's a Beta.

The mobile version will be released on 23 February, and if you're a Safari subscriber and have feedback, send it to safarimobile AT safaribooksonline DOT com. If you're not already a subscriber, you can get a free trial.

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9 Comments

Anonymous said:
February 9, 2009 9:21 PM

Thank You!!! Thank You!!!

Looks great on the iPhone!

Anthony Baker said:
February 10, 2009 3:04 AM

Looks beautiful. Been waiting for this sort of thing for some time. One recommendation: Get an iPhone icon wired up -- when saving the URL to the home screen, it uses a default screen grab icon from Mobile Safari. Otherwise, beautiful!

Robert said:
February 11, 2009 4:19 PM

Cool! I've been wondering when O'Reilly would do this. Now if you'd allow me to assign tags to all of the books in My Favorites so that I can find them without having to do Search > Book/Video Titles Only > My Favorites every time, I'd be a very happy camper.

I also liked Anthony's suggestion about the icon.

Rob said:
February 11, 2009 4:49 PM

By the way, I'd like to add that if, at some future date, Safari was available on either the Kindle or a Mac-equivalent tablet and I could see the entire page in portrait layout and go from page to page at the click of a button, I would go from being a casual Safari user to spending a couple of hours a day just reading books from my Favorites.

Bruce said:
February 11, 2009 5:29 PM

This is awesome! I've looked at a couple of books on the iPhone and it is incredibly readable!

samantha said:
February 24, 2009 4:47 AM

A bit to be desired. Too many logins. Those are expensive and painful on a phone. Everytime I leave a book and try to see my favorties or pick another it asks me again. This is completely clueless. It is not bloody likely my phone has changed hands between pages. Please fix.

Paul Pival said:
February 24, 2009 1:07 PM

I've sent this question through official channels too, but can you tell me if/how this will work for institutional (University) subscribers to Safari Books Online? When I try to access via iPhone from my institution's IP address, which is normally recognized for the "main" product, this time I'm stopped with a login and password...

Our institutional subscription is through ProQuest/Safari; maybe I need to go through them?

Sheree said:
July 15, 2009 7:46 AM

I, too, am having the same issue with access my institutional account through the mobile version. Is it possible??

Dale Bebber said:
August 8, 2009 2:11 PM

Excellent job. This tool is invaluable to me. Now that I have the convenience of reading on my Pal Pre I do a lot more of it.

Pre specific issue, top link doesn't link to the top of the page.

Again thanks for the great tool.

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