Mobile-optimized website for Safari Tech Books

ProQuest introduced a new mobile-optimized website for customers of the academic version of the Safari Tech Books collection, including the MPG.

The emphasis of this additional website is to deliver easy access to licensed content via a simplified user interface. You can view it at: http://m.proquest.safaribooksonline.com.

Safari Books Online's mobile website supports the following devices:

  • All iOS 3+ devices
  • All Android 1.5+ (supported without prefetching), 2.1+ (supported with prefetching)
  • Blackberry 6, PlayBook (Blackberry Tablet)

Please note that access to the Safari Tech Books collection is IP authenticated, thus you need to ensure that your mobile device is assigned an MPG IP address.

Please feel free to comment on the new mobile-optimized website – here or via our contact form.

7 thoughts on “Mobile-optimized website for Safari Tech Books”

  1. Librarian/engineer at another institution here.

    Have you figured out any way to get deep links to individual titles (on Safari, or to individual articles on other platforms with journal articles and seperate mobile interfaces) to link to the ‘mobile’ version for mobile?

    Where I am, even for Safari, most of our users go into it from direct links to specific titles, not from Safari home page.

  2. @Jonathan: From my point of view it is the responsibility of the website to provide a seamless transition from the default user interface to the mobile-optimized version and vice versa. Some publisher platforms are already auto-detecting and redirecting users with mobile devices, e.g. Highwire: http://bjps.oxfordjournals.org/content/56/3/487 will redirect to http://m.bjps.oxfordjournals.org/content/56/3/487 if the user agent can be detected.

    SafariBooks isn’t doing so yet, even it would be possible: A deep link like http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com/9781849512626 has it’s mobile equivalent: http://m.proquest.safaribooksonline.com/9781849512626. We have this issue on our feedback list for ProQuest.

  3. A short update regarding the auto-detection + redirection of users with mobile devices. ProQuest states that the functionality has been identified and documented as a possible future enhancement. However, they cannot provide an estimate for when that sort of functionality will become available.

  4. Hi everyone,

    I’m the VP of Engineering here at Safari Books Online. I’d love to work with some interested library partners on some significant new work on this product, especially with regards to mobile access. If you’re interested, please drop me an email at liza at safaribooksonline.com.

  5. You may notice that the book collection available via the mobile-optimized entry point contains less publications. ProQuest explains this as follows: "The difference in available ebooks between the interfaces is due to multiple reasons. Some ebooks are just not mobile-compatible. Some are not allowed to be available to mobile devices due to licensing restrictions. There will likely be a discrepancy between the books available through each method for quite some time unfortunately."

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