Safari Books Online , the leading provider of an on-demand digital library including books and videos for technology and business professionals, today announced Safari Bookbag, allowing the download of chapter and full book PDFs to the iPhone ™ and iPod ® touch. Safari Bookbag can be installed via the Apple App Store for no additional cost. Safari Books Online is the first online publisher to open their entire library to iPhone and iPod touch users.
Safari Books Online chose to integrate with Apple devices as its first mobile platforms after conducting a survey of its users. Among the respondents, 50 percent indicated the iPhone or iPod touch was the mobile device they used. The company plans to continue rapid expansion of its mobile strategy with other devices and readers in the months to come.
Bookbag users can synch their Apple devices with the “ My Downloads ” section of their Safari Books Online accounts, which houses PDF versions of books that have been downloaded. To access titles on the iPhone or iPod touch, users can select the chapter of the book they want to download by simply tapping on the title of the book. With the Bookbag application, any iPod touch or iPhone with Internet access (Edge, Wi-Fi, 3G) can automatically transfer chapters of books from the Safari library. Once the books are downloaded, the PDFs can be read and accessed at any time, even without an Internet connection.
“ The Safari Bookbag project represented an exciting programming challenge, ” said Erica Sadun , lead developer on Safari Bookbag and author, co-author and contributor to almost two dozen books about technology. “ The iPhone mixes Internet-connectivity with the realities of palm-top access. We succeeded in making Safari Books Online ‘ s Bookbag intuitively accessible. Between the simple Coverflow-based book selection screen to the tap-to-download chapters list and the friendly network access screens, Bookbag brings Safari Books Online into a native reader that takes Apple’s design philosophy to heart. ”
“ As the popularity of portable eBook readers increases, more and more of the people accessing our digital library are requesting Safari Books Online content on the go, ” said Dennis Kilian, vice president at Safari Books Online. “ The technology and design community – a significant portion of our customer base – are often Apple enthusiasts, and already use the iPhone and iPod touch on a daily basis. We created Safari Bookbag to offer another channel for the vast array of materials in our library, allowing people to create their own portable readers without having to purchase an additional device. ”
To install Safari Bookbag, click here . [ The link goes to the Safari Bookbag app for those who have iTunes installed. Otherwise, use this link http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/ to download iTunes and then use the Safari Bookbag app link to download Safari Bookbag. ]
About Safari Books Online
Safari Books Online ( www.safaribooksonline.com ), founded in 2001 as a joint venture between pre-eminent technology publishers O’Reilly Media, Inc., and Pearson Education, is an on-demand digital library delivering expert content from the leading authors in technology and business. Safari Books Online offers the combined collections of Prentice Hall Professional, O’Reilly Media, Addison-Wesley Professional, Microsoft Press, Sams, Que, Peachpit Press, John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier, lynda.com, Adobe Press, Cisco Press, Sun Microsystems Press, Wharton School Publishing, Apress, Course Technology, and many more top publishers in one fully searchable database. Technology professionals, software developers, web designers, and business and creative professionals use Safari Books Online as their primary resource for research, problem solving, learning, and certification training. Thousands of books, prepublication manuscripts, short documents, articles, and instructional videos are available. Safari Books Online is an essential, always-on business tool that is rapidly changing the way corporate, academic, and training organizations access information and is enabling increasingly mobile workforces to get technical and business reference resources anytime and from anywhere. Safari Books Online offers a range of business-to-business product mixes and pricing programs for every sized organization, as well as business-to-consumer options for individual users.