Technological musings from Canada's oceanside metropolis
|
|
| Vancouver Punditry Technological musings from Canada's oceanside metropolis |
|
|
Thursday, September 05, 2002 Buying reference books... or renting them? Recently hunting around for new information on e-business trends and methodology on the web, I happened on a couple of books at Addison-Wesley's AW Professional site. AW Professional specializes in books for IT professionals (Addison-Wesley, as you might know, is big in educational books). At first I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary about the AW Professional site. It was well laid out, standard left navigation. I browsed the catalogue in hierarchical fashion and drilled down to detail for the books I was interested in. I reached a book detail page for a great new e-business book, and noticed a familiar info offering: a thumbnail of the book cover, price, author, ISBN, and buy-it button. Interestingly, when I scrolled down the page for a description of the book, I was presented with a very thorough description, consisting of several paragraphs, and a links list to: - Table of Contents - Preface - Index - Sample Chapter(s), and - Author Biographies This was new. In all my book hunting exercises (mostly on Amazon, Chapters-Indigo, and ABE Books), I'd never come across so much of the book available for viewing on a web site. I reviewed the information at the sample chapters link. I'm not talking about excerpts here, but entire chapters were offered (and, as it happens, all of extreme import to my hungry mind at the time). I bookmarked the page with the excited haste akin to pocketing a $50 bill found lying in the street. I read through an entire eight-part chapter, and after a day or two of thinking about spending money on this soon to be redundant reference book, I weighed the pros and cons of making yet another reference book purchase. Being an impulsive but prudent shopper, I checked prices at Amazon, Chapters-Indigo (wasn't yet listed on ABE), and came back to AW Professional (with a 10% discount, this was the best price) with my credit card at the ready. If that wasn't enough... As fate would have it, I noticed a navigational tab at the top of the page entitled, 'Online Books'. Intrigued, I aborted the purchase process to follow that link... Welcome to InformIT Safari... cool name, I thought. I had entered a completely new environment. The intro summarized the site: Safari is a subscription-based reference library offering over 600 books from leading technical publishers. I powered on... Is my new book of choice in the 600 mix? Judging from the list of options, from Business Reference to Java to Web Development to XML, it probably was. I looked around a bit and was impressed by the level of sophistication of the application as well as the introduction of a rather new business model (to me anyway). After about 15 minutes I understood the essense of the InformIT Safari application and offering and, frankly, I'm still buzzing with excitement around the model. Here's the gist of it: Premise To compliment or replace the buying of printed IT business books, a member may, for a small monthly fee (automatically debited from a credit card), purchase the right to view, or "rent" the book through the InformIT web site. Depending on the level of membership, the member may "check-out" a number of books for as long as he/she likes. Once finished with one or more books, the member may then "check the books back in" once a month, which then opens up the opportunity to check out more books to the member service level. Books may be checked out at any time, but only checked back in one time in a given month. If members don't use the level of service they've purchased, their level (and next month's fee) is automatically reduced. Alternately, if members exceed their level of service by choosing to check out more books than their service level allows, they may instantly opt to increase their level of service. Bottom Line This is the most clever delivery of digital books I've found on the web so far. With the work being done in the e-book standards community around delivery devices, software that protects copyright, and all the other issues I, for one, will be interested in following the events leading to the ability of viable and standarized delivery and devices for e-books. My current (updated) vision is fairly simple: I imagine myself hunting through my favourite library of digital titles on my PC, choosing any number of volumes for download to my hand-held device, and then curling up on the couch with my hand-held device, reading to my heart's content. I can hardly wait! Today, however, I need to decide if I want to buy my e-business book or subscribe to the InformIT service where, for under $10CDN/mo, I can read my book plus up to 6 other titles in the next month.... on my PC. For now, that is. posted by T | 1:01 PM | |
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||