Safari U: Great Idea, Right Way to Market?

I wonder if Safari U's Web 2.0 business model can really outproduce the storefront copy center, the traditional channel for custom books. In the latter, publishing and delivery are integrated. O'Reilly's Safari U decouples publishing and delivery, making the process more complex and less certain for customers.

Sections: Education Emerging Practice

Topics: bootcamp HighOctaneBlogging publishing webservices

I'm building a text book for the next rendition of the High Octane Blogging Bootcamp using O'Reilly's Safari U. The main advantages I see are:

• Good corpus of material.
• (Potentially) Convenient web interface.

But, I wonder how they are bringing this thing to market. In many ways, they are tied to their book publishing model. A lot of the recent content is not really available because it has not been converted for custom publication. Also, the custom book has to be ordered in quantity, no one-offs. This requirement essentially dictates that the book be pushed through traditional marketing channels. You can't really offer it to small client groups over the web. Finally, any access to the book is only available online for a fee. Why not provide a preview as in their regular Safari offering? Frankly, such previews would just provide more reason to purchase a Safari subscription.

I'm having some frustrations getting the material I want out of this service. I may resort to a last minute coursepack from a local copy center. The copy center will call O'Reilly for permissions, and the book should be done in time for the January class. Ironically, although the bootcamp is about Web 2.0, we are likely going to have to resort to pre-web methods to get the textbook produced.

Local copy centers integrate publishing and delivery, simplifying up the process of creating custom books for customers, and providing more certainty. Oddly, O'Reilly decouples these two processes making the process more complex and less certain, all under the veneer of advanced web technology.

Bud posted this on December 7, 2005

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