Safari Online Books for iPad
Jinfo Blog

5th November 2010

By Nancy Davis Kho

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Safari Books Online announced yesterday that it has released an iPad app to allow users to view book content from their digital library. Subscribers will also be able to view content offline. The free app, called Safari To Go, is available for download now at Apple's iTunes App Store. It joins Safari Books Online versions already available for the iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry and Android smartphones, though the company says the iPad version is no derivative: 'the new Safari To Go app [was built]from the ground up specifically to leverage iPad capabilities such as pinch-to-zoom and drag and drop functions'. The full press release is available at http://digbig.com/5bctgg. Safari Books has always been on the forefront of digital book distribution; their technical books lend themselves to mobile consumption, and they've done a great job incorporating aspects of social media to build community between authors and potential readers, through programs like Short Cuts and Rough Cuts. Fittingly, their press release includes an infographic (http://digbig.com/5bctgf) that that shows the difference - as measured in weight, cost, and space - between having 11,000 books on an iPad vs. having 11,000 books physically. That's the number of titles available in Safari Online's digital library. Meanwhile, the Libraries of the University of California system celebrated the digitisation of the 3,000,000th book from their collections by releasing a list of the librarians' favourite digitised books. According to UC, 'The books encompass a wide variety of subjects, including winemaking, jellyfish, Chinese immigrants, and even Hanno the Carthaginian!' Check out the full list of favourite books at http://digbig.com/5bctgh.

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