O’Reilly Media started to release books as apps on iPhone

Tim O’Reilly is an Irishman born in Southern Ireland, who later emigrated to USA, and created O’Reilly publishing company.

Apart from his publishing company, Tim O’Reilly got famous particularly because he invented the term “Web 2.0” (i.e. Web 1.0 + social networking + AJAX) and infamous because he thinks that Vivek Kundra is qualified to be CIO of the whole USA.

Tim’s company is now called “O’Reilly Media” and it is very famous because of publication of many tech-related paper (!) books (on the cover of almost each book there is a drawing of some animal usually) and Make zine (where Philipp Torrone works). Instead of releasing these books as eBooks through some eBook publisher, O’Reilly Media apparently decided to cut out the middleman and to publish books to app store directly – as individual apps:

Each such book app from O’Reilly is basically an eBook reader in itself:

Commentary: the business model “release plenty of apps that are the same but just have different content” is used by many developers in iPhone app store mainly to generate pure junk. In case of O’Reilly Media however one will be able to get a lot of books from the original publisher, so we hope also bigger share goes to authors. Obviously one could go to “Safari Books Online” website of O’Reilly and buy PDF files of given book or rent it for online reading in HTML form, but since moving of PDF files to iPhone is not trivial (each app has its own sandbox so each app needs its own sync mechanism) and cumbersome, having some books as individual app might come in handy. Entrance of O’Reilly into iPhone app store marks the era of “if there is no app for that, it doesn’t exist” and clearly many people who use O’Reilly-published books in paper form will be happy.

To find O’Reilly-published books in your iPhone, just open app store app, and search for “O’Reilly Media, Inc.”. Currently only few are free, notably the missing manual of iPhone…

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Apart from iPhone, you might be interested also in Windows Mobile phones!