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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.

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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 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Helped develop and now have joined the Corante Network

The Community Engine played an important role in developing the new Corante hub network. In future posts, I'll be writing about the technology challenges we faced in bringing the network together. I also have some ideas for how to create bottom-up communities across network member blogs that I will share in future posts.

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As Stowe Boyd mentioned yesterday, Corante has established a network of topical sites that re-aggregate content from “thought-leading” bloggers and provide editorial insight on emerging trends. I'm honored to note that this blog was chosen to be part of Corante's web hub. I'm also proud to announce that The Community Engine played a pivotal role in getting the technological infrastructure to work.

Continue reading "Helped develop and now have joined the Corante Network"

Bud posted this on November 30, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)