Safari Books Online

I signed up for Safari Books Online today because I wanted to refresh my iOS skills with the latest edition of Beginning iOS 5 Development: Exploring the iOS SDK. The experience is however far from what I expected. Safari Books Online has been around for years and years so I thought they had figured it out and ironed out the rough edges with online reading.

The big screen reader is Flash based and it has a number of problems:

• The text is blurry.
• The pages are formatted for print, not for screen reading.
• The scrolling speed is so fast it's almost not usable (at least on a MacBook trackpad).

The "mobile optimized site" is perhaps not so optimized:

• The pages are shown as blurry images.
• The text is so small it is barely legible.
• There is no pinch-resizing.
• The zoom function makes the pages just too large to fit in landscape mode on an iPhone 4.
• The system doesn't remember where you left off, when you switch between the big screen reader and the mobile site.

And there's more:

• Why aren't errors in the text fixed?
• Why are links in the text not clickable?

Who said things are moving fast in our business? The IT sector is moving sloooowly.

But guess what, I'll probably become a paying customer just because of the convenience of immediate and ubiquitous access.