O'Reilly and Pearson Launch Safari Books Online

Posted on October 4, 2001

O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. and the Pearson Technology Group (PTG), a division of Pearson plc, announced a joint venture to launch a new online information retrieval service for the enterprise IT market. The venture's flagship service, Safari Tech Books Online, is an information retrieval service where enterprise IT departments can access content.

``Developers and system administrators constantly turn to the Web and IT books for information during their work day. We designed Safari Tech Books Online as a tool to help them get quick online access to a deep pool of technical information,'' said Tim O'Reilly, CEO of O'Reilly & Associates. ``It's a comprehensive, search-driven information interface. You might say it's the LexisNexis of the IT world.''

Using the Safari Tech Books Online service, a programmer working on a tight deadline with an urgent question about Java Beans can type in ``Java Beans'' and get a list of all of the Java Beans references in the Safari service, ranked from most relevant to least relevant. The user can then peruse the full text of relevant titles, chapters and sections. The service also allows users to bookmark, annotate and cut and paste code.

``IT professionals learn from print books. However, answers to urgent issues often come from non-book sources such as chat rooms, user groups and conversations with colleagues,'' said Ray Henderson, president of Pearson's InformIT.com division. ``These sources aren't necessarily timely, nor are they always the most reliable. Safari Tech Books Online gives users immediate access to information about very specific IT questions -- from the authors and publishers they trust the most.''

More than 600 IT titles are scheduled to be up on the site by year end. The Safari Tech Books Online service includes content from publishers including Addison Wesley Professional, Adobe Press, New Riders, O'Reilly & Associates, PeachPit Press, Prentice Hall PTR, Que, and Sams. Safari currently offers enterprise level IT departments a complimentary trial to the service for up to ten users. Individual IT professionals interested in trying the service, can access Safari Tech Books Online for $9.99 per month. The Safari service for individual users has been available at safari.oreilly.com since February 1, 2001 and currently has more than 1,500 individual users.