After many hours of dedicated developer time, our customers now have the ability to buy our book content by the chapter in PDF format. Pricing per chapter is $3.99.

This feature is being rolled out on 714 books initially, the same books that are part of our Copyright Clearance Center RightsLink project, through which our customers can purchase reuse rights to the same material for their Intranets, newsletters, course packs, websites, etc.

You can see an example of what the chapter purchase feature looks like on catalog pages at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596527440/index.html. The button is on the right side of the page, clustered with the other purchase buttons.

I love the usability of these independent chapters. Each has its own table of contents and index, which is possible because of the infrastructure we built for delivering content through SafariU. Each chapter is also bookmarked and searchable. What they are still lacking is a book cover, and the ability to click a table of contents or index entry and have that part of the chapter appear, but those features are coming.

I’m eager to know what customers think of this, and what we can do to make the packaging of our content even more convenient. This is yet another step towards providing our content in whatever form you, the customer, wants it in.

Regards, –Allen