O'Reilly Media introduces "Rough Cuts"

I have long been a fan of O’Reilly Media’s technical books, and a happy subscriber to “Safari Bookshelf,” their online library; in its most basic form, for about $10 a month the Safari plan entitles you to read up to five O’Reilly books on-screen at the same time. It’s a tremendous bargain and value.

Safari is about to get a lot more interesting. O’Reilly has just announced “Rough Cuts,” a way to gain access to very early editions of books on emerging technologies as they are being developed.

Safari Books Online is pleased to announce the launch of the new Rough Cuts service. Rough Cuts gives you early access to content on cutting-edge technologies — before it’s published. It lets you literally read the book as it is being written.

The four inaugural Rough Cuts titles come from O’Reilly Media and share our focus on hot emerging technologies: Ajax Hacks, Flickr Hacks, Ruby on Rails: Up and Running, and Ruby Cookbook. In February, O’Reilly will follow up with Ubuntu Hacks, Ajax Design Patterns, and Perl Hacks. The Pearson Technology Group will join the Rough Cuts service later this quarter with: Macs on the Go, Real World Adobe Creative Suite 2, Secrets of Videoblogging, Imagination Challenge and ASP.NET 2.0 Unleashed.

This is a great idea and should prove to be an interesting experiment; O’Reilly has consistently found ways to remain relevant as a print publisher in an increasingly Web-based world, and this idea shows a lot of promise.

(Also posted at Knowledge Work)