Timothy Post.com

I have a confession to make- I’m a tech book junkie. Over the past year, I have purchased (and returned half of them) close to 40 tech books. No, I haven’t actually read all of them (although I did intend to read each one at the time of purchase. lol). Instead, I read about 25% cover to cover and the rest of them I read chapters here and there.

I love tech books. For me, there’s nothing better than plopping myself down in my favorite “reading chair,” grabbing a Diet Pepsi, and delving into a whole new topic of tech. But there’s been one big problem. Tech books are really expensive. Sure, they’re a good investment and my book habit is a hell of a lot healthier than drinking 3 Mt Gay and tonics, eating a rib-eye steak, and smoking a Davidoff cigar. Nonetheless, it’s still adds up at $38 to $50 bucks a pop.

My solution had been to be be very careful with the books and return the books to Borders or Barnes & Nobles for store credit which could then be applied to my next batch of tech books. By the way, if anyone wants to know which Boston bookstores have the best tech sections drop me an email (hint: Cambridgeside Galleria Borders and Burlington Barnes & Noble). This “read and return” practice had always made me feel slightly guilty.

I had even begun to do Bittorent searches for tech books. Surprisingly, there are some spam-type outfits which will scan tech books into digital format and then make them available for download. The catch is that these folks make the real front cover of a scanned book the 2nd page in the PDF and make the first page an advertisement for whatever product/service they are trying to “hawk.” The quality and selection of tech books available through bittorent clients isn’t great but decent enough.

Thus, you can imagine my astonishment and delight when I stumbled upon the O’Reilly Publishing service called Safari Books Online. Safari Books Online is simply the book equivalent of Netflix. You pay $19.95 each month and you can have access to 10 books at any one time online. You must keep each book in your Safari “bookshelf” for a minimum of 30 days. The selection of books is phenomenal. I mean it. There are literally thousands of the top selling tech books available.

In my bookshelf currently I have, Mac OS X Tiger Killer Tips, Real World Mac Maintenance and Backups (after spending 2.5 hours in Apple Store limbo the other day I figured it’s time I learned more about OS X), and Visual QuickStart Guide WordPress 2 (a great book on Wordpress even for more experienced bloggers).

Since users can only have 10 books on their bookshelf at any one time I have decided that I will stagger the addition of books to 4 in first 10 days, 3 in the next 10 days, and 3 more in the final 10 days of the first month. Thus, I will be able to replenish my bookshelf in subsequent moths with 3 new books every week and a half.

Like Netflix, there are other plans. One for 5 books at $9.95 a month and another all you can eat (unlimited access to all books) for $49.95 per month (currently $39.95). While reading books online isn’t exactly the same as holding the actual book it is almost as good. If you want to buy any of the books you can do so at a 35% discount (any purchase over $29.95 gets free shipping). You can also download individual chapters to read off line. And they have added little bit-size single topic pamphlet type books.

I can’t wait to feed my habit of tech books GUILT FREE. I highly recommend you check it out for yourself. I for one, am rooting for O’Reilly’s Safari and would love to see the service expanded to include more tech publishers (can anyone say Friends of Ed {I love the pink book binders for FoE} and Pragmatic Programmers?) and also include other mediums like video, screen casts, and audio books.

OK, that’s enough for now. I need to go finish Dreaming in Code so I can start reading the books in my Safari bookshelf.

Question for you: What’s your all time favorite tech book? Let us know in the comments.

// 02.23.2007 at 8:57 pm // Tagged Uncategorized