Safari Books Online

I always loved the idea of having access to the Safari library and I had recently another couple of months paired with some time to actually use it. Again despite trying to read as much as I could I only managed to read about three to four books in the last four months. I enjoyed it the most on my 24" LCD monitor followed by the laptop scree and last by my TouchPad. I was running the TouchPad on both WebOS and Android but the browser version just stinks. Make some dedicated reading app - That can't be too difficult. Another note on the TouchPad: I read the Economist (Safari doesn't have a usable offline mode) on an airplane ride and my eyes hurt after two hours.

The missing offline mode supposedly gets mitigated by earning tokens which you can use to download content (like one token per chapter) but after three months I didn't earn enough tokens to download any book which renders this feature completely useless.

The interface is borderline useless. The HTML interface is worse than the real one but I am still trying to figure out how to effectively get to the next page without using the scroll bar. A web browser does this with but that doesn't work seamlessly in Safari. As much as I like it when a book looks like a book - a screen doesn't have pages I need to turn. The chapter should just be a flow of text and NOT interrupted by footers and headers...

I actually did the math and if I would have to pay myself for books I might be better off just buying a Kindle version every month than subscribing to Safari. So as much as I like it and as much as I would want every company I work for to give me a subscription it isn't that valuable for me to get a subscription myself if the workplace doesn't offer it. In that case I would rather by the books outright...