Press Releases
Safari® Books Online Opens Up API Set, Allowing Access To Content From Thousands Of Books
July 28, 2004, Portland, OR-Safari® Books Online, LLC, a joint venture between industry-leading technology publishers O'Reilly Media, Inc. and The Pearson Technology Group, a division of Pearson plc (NYSE: PSO), announced the introduction of the Safari Affiliate Program today at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). Free to affiliates, the Safari Affiliate Program enables anyone with a Web site to add content from the thousands of technical and business books in the Safari e-reference libraries onto their site. In addition to providing Safari content, affiliates can earn a stipend from their visitors who click thru and subscribe to Safari.
The Safari Affiliate Program, available at safari.oreilly.com/affiliates and safari.informit.com/affiliates, can accommodate both users looking for a quick way to start earning referral fees and developers who can utilize the powerful API calls to access Safari content. For those looking for simple plug-and-play solutions, the program's QuickLinks automatically embed the affiliate's information into banners and buttons provided, so all that's required from the affiliate is a quick cut and paste to their site. Similarly, pre-programmed SafariBoxes let affiliates easily display Safari search results on topics that tie into their site.
"Although we worked hard to make the site accessible to users at all technical levels, we're particularly excited about opening up the API to developers," explains Sean Devine, managing director of Safari Books Online. "Sites that serve as resources for developers have already expressed considerable interest in integrating content from books in the Safari e-reference libraries as an additional resource for their visitors." These site developers, who are comfortable rolling up their sleeves to more fully harness the power of Safari's content, can dig into the Safari Affiliate Program's detailed Web Services instructions and implementation examples that show how to pull it all together.
Even in advance of the official launch, the Safari API has been picked up by key developer sites looking to make content from Safari's more than 2,500 technology books readily accessible through their sites. An example highlighted at OSCON is Cignex Technologies, Inc., which used the Safari XML API set to create a plug-in that will allow Eclipse users to search the Safari e-reference library within the Eclipse environment. That means a developer who is working on a J2EE project and is interested in searching information related to "Threading" in Java can type in the keywords in the Safari search window and execute a search on the Safari library without leaving the IDE. The developer can browse through the search results and also drill down into a particular search result to view more details. Once convinced that he/she has identified the right information, he/she can navigate to the Safari portal to access the premium content.
"Part of the Eclipse success as one of the fastest growing Integrated Development Environments (IDE) is the comprehensiveness of the tools made available to the developer within the platform" said Rajesh Setty, chief executive officer of Cignex Technologies. "With the Safari search plug-in a developer can launch a search across the thousands of leading technical books in the Safari library while still inside the Eclipse environment - a great time-saver for a developer looking for a quick answer."
The Eclipse example is just one of a number of implementation examples provided on the Safari Affiliate Program Web site. Other integration scenarios provided include displaying search results by keyword, adding chapter previews to book reviews, and improving affiliate productivity by integrating Safari searches into their browsers. In addition to serving as inspiration, each example comes complete with details of what the integration would take to accomplish.
Demonstrations of the Safari Affiliate Program and the Eclipse plug-in can be seen at the Safari booth at OSCON at the Downtown Marriott Hotel, Portland Oregon. Paul Bausch, developer and author of Amazon Hacks, will also conduct an in depth review of the Safari public API in a breakout session at the in the Meadowlark room on July 29 from 5:20pm - 6:05 pm.
