Thursday, September 27, 2007

Geek Books and the Digital World

I have become a fan of books from O'reilly publishing. They are famous for the "Hacks" series and in fact, if I were teaching a statistics class I would strongly consider using Statistics Hacks.

But, that’s not actually what I wanted to talk about. As a tablet pc user I do a lot of reading on my HP Tabletand one of my favorite finds has been O’reilly’s “online books” website called safari. The shelf life of a good technology book isn’t always that long, but with this service I can read the whole book through, and if it’s good enough, I can order the paper based book at a 35% discount (what?? that’s amazing).

I pay 20 dollars a month to be able to have 10 books on my virtual bookshelf. Once a book is added to the bookshelf it has to remain there for 30 days. But, even though I can only have 10 books on my bookshelf (they have to be on my bookshelf, otherwise they can't be read), the search function can find subjects across the entire library of publishers (what?? that’s amazing). If the search turns up a book that's not on my bookshelf, I can add it--that is, if I have open slots on my bookshelf.

The downside if there is one—the bookmarking tool is a bit clunky. But, the good news, use Diigo and not only can you bookmark the page, but you can even store the paragraph clipping for future reference. Because the site is password protected you will need to login to Safari, before clicking your diigo bookmark link.