O'Reilly Launches Per Chapter Book Sales

O'Reilly has added the ability to download individual book chapters to their Safari online service. What this really means is they're offering the ability to purchase books on a per chapter basis. You have to be a Safari subscriber to do this and the book has to be on your bookshelf, but that isn't too big of a problem.

The pricing is an additional $5 per month on top of the base Safari subscription for 5 chapters and then $10 for every 5 additional chapters. The download tokens are good for 90 days and your subscription downloads will accrue month to month during that period.

The downloads are standard PDFs with no restrictive DRM. They discourage distribution by embedding your account information as a footer on each page in the file. That seems like an excellent idea. Unfortunately, I'm sure some idiot will figure out how to strip that information. That will be too bad as it is a completely non-intrusive way of tying the content to a particular user. You're not limited in what devices you can put them on or any other non-sense about how many copies you can make or whatever. That's DRM done right, it ties the content to you, but still leaves you in control of the item you're purchasing without having to jump through any hoops. That's the way it should be.

I'm actually thinking this new service may make Safari actually cheaper to use. Right now I'm subscribed for a 20 slot bookshelf at $25 per month, however most of those slots are taken up by the same books month to month. Of those books I also only ever refer to a few chapters out of each. So I'm thinking it might be possible to drop down to a ten slot subscription with five downloads for $20 by downloading the particular chapters I use all the time and then removing those books. That still leaves me ten slots for the books that I rotate through. I read a lot, but so far I haven't been rotating anywhere near ten books per month.

Overall this just makes the already great Safari service even better. I've now completely stopped using paper books on technology topics and I've been using Safari even for the books I already own. It's just so convenient. I absolutely love the ability to add a book on some subject that I'm mildly interested in, read a few chapters and then remove it the next month. I used to waste so much money doing that kind of thing at $30-50 per book. I built a huge library, but that library also became a huge burden and dated extremely fast. Now I can satisfy my curiosity for a couple dollars and then just buy what I'm really interested in. Love it.

Posted by Kimbro Staken