To help fill that gap, Safari Books Online offers its "Rough Cuts" service, where subscribers can pay to read technology how-to books on the Web as they are written chapter by chapter. Subscribers can also offer comments to the author, such as suggesting the inclusion of more details or other changes before the final book is printed.
"We're trying to leverage the power of the Internet" to give IT workers early access to books in progress and get their feedback to make the works as accurate and topical as possible, said Sean Devine, president of Sebastopol, Calif.-based Safari.
The online service, which began in January, allows subscribers to purchase access for about 50% of the cost of the print book. Safari, a joint venture between O'Reilly Media Inc. and The Pearson Technology Group, has been selling electronic versions of its tech books for about five years, but this is its first interactive offering. The books can be read online using a Web browser or saved to be read later. Safari has about 1 million user subscriptions for its online books, and around 50,000 have access to the Rough Cuts service, Devine said.
Rough Cuts users can purchase the finished books at a discount after they're published.
One user of the service, Allie Rogers, chief technology officer at software vendor Triple Point Technologies in Westport, Conn., said Rough Cuts has been a boon to him, particularly in getting the freshest information on a regular basis about the still-developing Ruby on Rails scripting language. The book he's reading online, The Ruby Cookbook, won't be published in print until July, but Rogers said he has been able to use it productively through his Rough Cuts subscription, which cost him US$24.99, half of the print edition's expected price of $49.99. His company is using Ruby for internal systems to develop its software products, he said.
"So far, I'm looking at it as a way to get the published book in front of my eyes and be practically usable to me in a much shorter time frame," Rogers said. "I'm a big fan of it, and they've done a reasonable job implementing Rough Cuts. It's a homerun for me."
Before trying the Rough Cuts service, Rogers was a regular user of Safari's electronic books program, which allows him to download a technology book onto his computer. Rogers said the downloads are easy to read and he consult them while traveling without having to carry a heavy book. That's a valuable tool, he said, especially when he is on the road at customer sites for weeks at a time and needs to easily access the book contents.
Rough Cuts is also changing the ways authors do their work, said Portland, Ore.-based Lucas Carlson, who co-wrote The Ruby Cookbook with Leonard Richardson.
"It's been an interesting process," Carlson said. The two-dozen comments received from online readers about the chapters as they were written provided help on parts of the book that were "overdone or underdone," Carlson said.
One example was a chapter on the Ruby on Rails project, which is a hot topic for many Web developers. "People wanted more information for that chapter, and we worked on providing more on that," which wouldn't have been possible under a traditional book-publishing model. "It gives the book more value to get it in before it's published," rather than adding notes in future editions. The Ruby on Rails software went through several versions while the book was being written, and the input from online readers helped keep the book up to date, he said.
The comments were received in the last three months and were integrated into the book, which went into production last month, he said.
"I think it's the future of technical writing, because I think technology turnover is speeding it up," Carlson said. "To have people who want to provide feedback to authors is helpful."