If you haven’t already received or seen an invite to our webinar with author Joseph Albahari and O’Reilly Editor John Osborn on Writing LINQ Queries with LINQPad, then consider this a personal invitation to the event. The date and time are Wednesday, February 20, 5:00 ET/2 PT. We would have scheduled it earlier but the author lives in Australia.

This is a new format for us, a live event with an author and editor talking about what’s new and important while also demoing important features on the screen. We’ll also record the event and publish for later viewing, but the live event will also include a Q&A, a great opportunity for asking your own questions.

Judging from the number of RSVPs we’ve received, and from the knowledge and enthusiasm of the author, this will likely be the first of many such events with authors, editors, conference speakers, and bloggers in our midst. Let me know via the response mechanism below if there’s anyone you’d like to hear from in particular.

RSVP now if you’re interested in attending.

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

We get a fair number of site license requests for our books, where someone wants to host digital copies on their Intranet so a group of developers can access them. The customer experience to do that was very Web 0.5, and required the customer to search our website for what they hoped was the appropriate email address to send a query. I think we’ve fixed that. For books that are already available in PDF format, there is now a link that says “Buy PDF Site License” on the catalog page. Clicking it opens a simple form with the book title and ISBN already blown in. Just include your name, email address, and phone number, and our Customer Service group will be in touch.

We’re rolling this out on more and more books as we convert files to PDF. We’re processing an additional 115 now, and they should be available within the next week.

I’m giving a keynote tomorrow at the BISG (Book Industry Study Group) Making Information Pay Conference in New York. My talk is focused on all the challenges and opportunities facing publishers as customers increasingly migrate to the Web for information and entertainment. I was lucky enough to come across the following quote, which I think illustrates how we all need to approach our jobs:

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few.
–Zen master Shunryu Suzuki

I’d bet that the folks who envisioned myspace and craigslist, youtube and wikipedia, and all the other ventures that are challenging big industries run by “experts,” all started out as beginners.

BTW, I discovered this quote in a wonderful book titled Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why.

The ReadSpeaker audio feature went live on the O’Reilly Radar last night, and I’m very pleased to receive positive responses from listeners. Here is a sampling of what people are saying about the service:

I really really love readspeaker. I wish I could download it as a program for my Mac. I wish it was incorporated into Leopard!

Very nice feature. Glad to see O’Reilly reaching out in this way.

This is potentially a great service. The speech is reasonably well paced, and pleasant.

I love the feature. Thank you very much

Really cool service! Wow!

I love this service! I am a very slow reader and hate to read on screen. It also allows me to multi-task as I listen.

Thank you for such a wonderful tool.

Next on the list is to enable the podcasting feature that will turn RSS feeds into mps files. Keep the feedback coming, good or bad. You can submit your thoughts through the “Feedback” link on the audio pop-up, as well as make suggestions to improve pronunciation.

You may have noticed a new feature that’s appearing throughout the O’Reilly web sites, the ability to “listen” to our articles and blogs. You can hear some examples on this blog or at:

http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/
http://www.oreillynet.com/conferences/blog/
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/

Click the “Listen” button to the right of the title and a synthetic voice reader will read the article to you.

I’ve been watching this technology for a number of years now, and I’m really excited to finally launch something that works to the degree this does. I’m excited for a number of reasons.

First, because people are so busy and have so many content choices to choose from, this will give us an added advantage. People who normally read our content, a singular task, can now listen to it while doing other things, as they would a radio program. We’ll shortly be implementing a podcast-on-the-fly feature so that readers can choose to listen to our content at their leisure on their iPods and other devices.

Second, this will make our content more accessible. The technology behind this was first created to aid the handicapped.

Third, the technology behind this reads XML, html, and xhtml, and can be easily trained. We can train the voice to read Java or Perl code accurately, or tables. This has been a roadblock with other voice technology I’ve looked at.

Is it perfect yet? No. As you click around and listen you’ll notice imperfections. The reader stumbles over malformed html and certain words and phrases, and it still needs help when reading code. But as I said, the voice is easily trained, and we’re adding a feedback mechanism so readers can help us perfect the service. That will be included in a day or two. It will obviously be better for straight narratives, and less useful for code heavy content, but even that can be dealt with. And a note to editors and copyeditors, the reader makes typos very obvious.

The company behind this is ReadSpeaker, a small company based in Sweden. ReadSpeaker was started in 1999 with the goal of making the Internet accessible to the handicapped. Since succeeding in that realm they’ve expanded to others. I first came across them on the International Herald Tribune website. Their clients are primarily based in Europe and we’re they first US customer.

I’d like to give a big thanks to Jonathan Wellons, Laura Adair, and Julie Delany for implementing this on the O’Reilly Network, oreilly.com, and conferences blog. Gabriel Williams will shortly be rolling out the same service on the Radar.

–Allen

P.S.–We have the choice of both male and female voices, and the correct one will soon apply to the gender of the author.

I want to announce the launch of Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink feature on oreilly.com. Who is CCC, and what is RightsLink?

The CCC was established by the Library of Congress to facilitate the legitimate clearance of copyrighted content, and publishers sign up for their services. The CCC has a website, copyright.com, where anyone interested in reusing publisher’s content can clear and pay to reuse material. It’s a 20th century process, however, where someone has to have our content in-hand, know that the CCC exists and that they have a website, and that copyright can be cleared. RightsLink is different because it’s implemented on our site. For example, go to any one of the following book’s online Table of Contents page

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/csstmm/toc.html
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596527310/toc.html
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/learnperl4/toc.html

and you’ll see that, along with the ability to purchase a book in print or pdf (if that’s available), or view it on Safari, a customer can now purchase the rights to reuse chapters, recipes, hacks, and images. A typical customer for this will be corporations, teachers, magazines, and websites that want to reuse our content on their intranets, newsletters, print and online publications, and course packs.

Completion of this project also gets us much closer to fulfilling several additional projects. It’s the next step in what I call our content ubiquity strategy, whereby we make our content available at the point at which someone is making an information acquisition decision, and in the format the customer wants. It also takes us closer to a full book viewer on oreilly.com and towards full content search. We’re now also much closer to selling books by the chapter in pdf format. Additionally, this will greatly help our ranking in search engines. Up until now search engines were only able to spider the metadata on our catalog pages, such as title and author name. Now they’ll be able to spider the table of contents and all the text available in the preview of each chapter and section.

Many people helped with this project. Laura B. backed it from the crazy idea stage. CJ and Laurie P. helped with the early pricing models. Pascal Honscher helped define and drive the implementation, and came up with a number of innovative processes that surprised the CCC folks. Charles Greer, Ben Bangert, Jeff Boyd harnessed the power of the MarkLogic database to generate the dynamic TOC pages. John Haren, Eric Parker, Laura Adair, Julie Delany, and Mace Bergmann were instrumental in making this work programatically. Ryan Grimm and Andrew Bruno, both now O’Reilly graduates, were responsible for building the database that makes this possible.

–Allen