May 20, 2005

Safari U textbooks

The Future of Textbook Selection: An Interview with Jon Preston
discusses an IT profs use of the "build your own" textbook feature of O'Reilly's Safari ebook product. Basically, the prof is able to pull together bits and pieces from various O'Reilly titles and set his own text for a C# class. And not just online versions either, but a real print textbook. I can imagine this facility would be absolutely perfect for programming language or operating system courses, even for more advanced database or application oriented courses.

O'Reilly was a bit slow tapping into the academic library market for Safari (and the product is still less than perfect for us -- poor quality MARC records being an example) and I haven't see anything about how libraries with Safari subscriptions could give access to the custom texts. I hope that's something that's coming down the line.

No comments: