A Tale of Two Online Book Sites

For both personal reasons and for professional reasons, I recently signed up for O’Reilly’s Safari Online Books service and I purchased an Amazon Upgrade¹ of the Robert Coles’ book I am using in my seminar this spring, Doing Documentary Work.

Personal reasons aside for the moment, my professional reasons were twofold: I wanted both access to the content the two services provided and I wanted to try out the services themselves:

1. I needed immediate access to the Coles’ book because my own copy went missing and I wanted to finish preparing for my seminar before our first meeting tomorrow. A subscription to O’Reilly’s service would give me access to a number of titles that might play a role in my teaching now or in the future, and the chance to access those books for a relatively small sum — O’Reilly graciously admitted me into their defunct $9.99/month subscription plan while their SafariU goes on holiday — was too nice to pass up. The two titles I am reading now are: slide:ology and The Lean Forward Moment.
2. As the humanities in particular and all of us in general slowly rumble towards a digitized distribution scheme for practically everything — well, let’s hope nutrients stay off-line (though there’s enough effluvia already passing through the internet’s “pipes”) — I wanted to try out two of the possibilities currently being deployed in the mainstream.

O’Reilly is usually a bit ahead of the mainstream — and often fairly smart — but in this instance, their online reader looks, and acts, a lot like Amazon’s reader. Here are some screen shots:

<img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3104/3223617178_90b391f677.jpg” width=”500″ height=”347″ alt=”reader-amazon” title=”Amazon’s Reader: Cramped />
Amazon’s Reader

Safari’s Reader

Safari’s Reader scrolled to maximize the page.

As can be seen in all the screen shots, but perhaps best in the last (bottom-most) one above, there is no way to see a whole page on a MacBook screen. (And I had no better luck when I had a 15″ MBP.) There’s a zoom option, but there is no way to zoom out, only zoom in. Safari is a bit more advanced in offering an HTML option for reading, but it doesn’t work on any of the books I have checked out yet. So, it’s an offer, but one you can’t accept.

All of this might be mitigated by the option to go full-screen with these readers, and I hope to explore some way to do this in Firefox, but it’s not built into the readers themselves — if Youtube can do this for videos, why can’t we do this for books?