BIT-101 [2003-2017]

This has been out for quite a while, but I finally decided to give it a look.

https://safari.oreilly.com/

The deal is pretty simple. Twenty bucks a month, you can read any book in the catalog, on line. Not just the usual O’Reilly titles with the strange animals on the cover either. Books by Prentice Hall, Addison Wesley, SAMS, Que, Alpha, etc. When I click on “Browse all titles”, I see “Books 1 to 10 of 3006”. That’s a pretty good selection.

You can print whatever you want – the print function even creates a new page that removes all the extraneous banners and so forth – and download 5 chapters per month in pdf format. Of course, if you cancel your subscription, they say you have to delete the pdf and destroy the printed copy. Um…yeah, anyway…

I started out with the 2 week free trial. I"m like a kid in a candy shop. One caveat though – you have a ten-slot bookshelf. To read a book, you have to put it in the bookshelf. Once it’s there, you can’t remove it for 30 days. I filled up half my bookshelf in the first 10 minutes, thinking I could remove them instantly.

Pros and cons:

Pros:

1. Cheap! $120 a year. That’s 3-4, maybe 5 books worth.
2. Instant. I want a book on Eclipse and Ant. Browse the catalog, search, find one that looks good, I have it.
3. No big risk. A book isn’t exactly what you want. All you lost is a slot in the shelf for a month. One tenth of $20 = $2.

Cons:

1. There’s something about having the mass of a real book. That might be hard to overcome for some. It’s also nice to have a real bookshelf full of books as references.
2. If you are the type who likes reading on the bus or subway, etc. rather than at your pc, it might not be the best bet. You can always print stuff out though.
3. The whole bookshelf thing requires some thought and planning. If you add a few books that aren’t particularly useful to you, you might be in a position where you really need a book and don’t have a slot. I think you might be able to purchase another slot.

Overall, I’m enjoying the free trial a lot, and I think I’ll continue the subscription for at least a month or two and see how it feels in the long run. I love my physical books, but honestly, once you buy and and do the initial read-through of a computer book, there’s a good chance that it’s going to gather dust until it becomes outdated. I just threw out a couple of boxes worth of Flash 4 and 5 books. Probably two or three years worth of a subscription righ there!