O'Reilly Network: O'Reilly's E-Book Strategy

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Update: Sept. 2009

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I searched for "eBook" on your site and the first hit is dated 1998. I did find your discussion about their economics, but even it is dated 2000.

I think your site should post something more up-to-date about your status with e-books. For O'Reilly & Associates, such a hip company, to not have an e-book plan is hard for me to understand.

My vote, of course, is that you offer all your books in an e-book format. I tried paper, I tried Safari, but they didn't work for me. On the other hand, I find myself reading e-books on my palmtop in the doctor's office, etc. -- squeezing in study time whenever I can, without carrying a laptop that takes a while to boot.

I suppose I could look for a small web server to run on my palmtop, then download and read Safari books that way, but I'll never get around to it. I don't deny that perhaps e-books should be in HTML format.

I could also use audio books, either in audio (on an iPod) or having textbooks read to me, while I'm driving, etc.

Not only do we have an e-book strategy, we have one that's working far better than anyone else's! I'm referring specifically to Safari, and particularly the long-term strategy of which the current Safari service is just the first instantiation.

It's my belief that simply putting a book into some kind of PDF or other representation of the printed book is like pointing a camera at a stage play and calling it a movie. The Internet does morph what people want from books and how they use them. You have to train yourself to look away from the form of a book, and think about its purpose. A fantasy novel and a technical reference book have the same format today, but will they tomorrow? I like to think that EverQuest is more the electronic successor to Lord of the Rings than a downloadable print version of the same. So the question we've asked ourselves is, How is technical reference going to change over time as we all learn how to use the online medium more effectively?

We've always felt that the e-book would either be bigger or smaller than the print book, and that at least in the near term, the web would be the preferred access device. The O'Reilly Network, which offers online content in bite-size chunks, is the "smaller" part of the strategy; Safari, a database of thousands of books that you can search across, is the "bigger" part.

Search is the real beauty of Safari. You can search a single book, or thousands. You can search the full text, or just the code examples. This allows you to find which book has the information you need--something that a downloadable e-book forces you to decide before you purchase.

But search is just the beginning. What's especially important about having a huge XML database of technical content is that you can start to build new services against it, services which, not unsurprisingly, can break things down into smaller bits of content. What's more, Safari is a bet on an increasingly connected future, where people are routinely online, not just from their desktops or even their laptops, but from their PDAs and cell phones. Serving that unwired future requires a big database backend, against which you can serve up just what the user wants.

I think the success of our approach is in the numbers. Safari is now a multi-million dollar business with hundreds of thousands of users, while downloadable e-books have never really taken off. Companies such as MightyWords and Rocket eBooks that bet on stand-alone e-books have failed, while Safari has grown steadily. However, I know that Chris Pirillo has had some success with his GnomeTomes, and Adam Engst has made something of a splash with his recent Take Control series of e-books on Mac OS X, so it's clear that the stand-alone or downloadable market is heating up.

One of the big issues is not just developing the product, but also developing the sales channel. Where and how are these things going to be sold? See my essay, Piracy is Progressive Taxation, as well as my much earlier essay, Publishing Models for Internet Commerce, for more information on why channels of distribution are so important. And of course, part of what we've been building with Safari is a distribution channel.

Note also that neither GnomeTomes nor the Take Control series are "books" as we know them--they are shorter documents, low priced and aimed at disconnected readers. We do think that this market is heating up to the point where it's worth tackling. It's still small, because all of the distribution is direct (there are no established reseller channels), but there are enough users like yourself who want to have disconnected access.

This is perfect timing for phase two of our e-book strategy. Having built the Safari database, we can now offer additional services beyond the web browser interface. These include a custom textbook project (in which professors can mix and match sections from Safari books with their own classroom materials to build their own class-specific textbooks), a downloadable option for Safari subscribers, and a series of shorter documents sold by the piece, à la GnomeTomes.

The timing of your question is good, since we are announcing Safari Max, our first premium channel, on December 2. This will provide our users with offline chapters that they can download. We are using PDF as the format, but if there is demand, we could just as easily use an e-book format (.LIT) or send a clipping to a Palm. We've chosen PDF because the reader is the most ubiquitous. Watch safari.oreilly.com for details.

Another twist to the ebook story is playing out in the online documentation and tools that software companies provide to their developer communities. The most recent release of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, for example, presents its users with constantly updated lists of links to Help, sample code, articles and whitepapers as they code .NET and Windows applications, providing a self contained learning environment tailored to the needs of the moment. O'Reilly has been testing the viability of this environment for book content by publishing the reference sections of four .NET Nutshells in a format that allows their content to be plugged directly into the Visual Studio dynamic Help system.

The next version of Windows, code named Longhorn, will take integration with Microsoft Help one step further by making it possible for third-party publishers to directly annotate and enhance the MSDN documents. To learn more about O'Reilly's collaboration with Microsoft on this new facility, take a look at Ian Griffith's O'Reilly Network story, Longhorn SDK Annotations .

Safari is also already integrated with the Research Task Pane in Microsoft Office, and we hope that this will be the model for Safari integration with Microsoft's "Whidbey" developer tools release in Spring 2004. You can't do this kind of thing with stand-alone e-books. You need a database. Though the projects with Microsoft are farthest along, we're engaged in similar discussions with other software tools vendors as well.

What's particularly interesting about these efforts to deliver reference and tutorial content through software help engines, using our XML repository as a backend, is that they represent not just a new form factor for delivering the content, but also a new distribution channel. And distribution has so far been the Achilles heel of most stand-alone e-book efforts.

So as you can see, our strategy is to build a flexible data repository supporting XML web services that will allow us to deliver content into a variety of channels--the web, downloadable documents, and software help engines--as they develop.

You also asked about spoken-word books. It's one of my pet projects, actually, but alas one that I haven't managed to get to. In the mid-90s, we produced a series of technical audio interviews on tape, called "Geek of the Week." It was a fun project, but the sales weren't enough to keep it going. More recently, I imagined how cool it would be to build an audio exchange facility on oreilly.com, where anyone who wanted to read a chapter from one of our books could do so, and upload the resulting MP3 file. We'd make them available for free download. I wanted to seed the collection, though, by having one or more of our authors read from their books. And I never got that off the ground. There are a lot of issues after all--how do you read code out loud, for instance? But heck, if anyone reading this column wants to give it a try, send me the MP3 file, and we'll make it available.

P.S. I've written or spoken about e-books more recently than what you seemed to find. Here are a few URLs:

I'm not surprised you didn't find them via the O'Reilly site search engine, since not all of them were on oreilly.com. The best way to find what I've written, and links to external essays or interviews, is to go to tim.oreilly.com, where links to my writings and interviews on various subjects have been collected.

You can also find even more via the following Google search. Hey, I found a couple that even I had forgotten! Got to add them to tim.oreilly.com. . . .