SAS Publishing has been offering eBooks through partners like Amazon, Apple, and Google, for a number of years. Our content is also available through subscription-based companies like Books 24x7, Safari, and EBSCO.
We have learned that taking content developed for hardcopy and turning it into an ebook is not a simple process. There is no “easy” button to turn content directly into a book designed for a digital reader. Because each reader has a different size and different features, technical publishing specialists must tweak the content for each device and for each reseller. It won’t scale. But, scale we must, because SAS users are demanding ebooks faster than we can produce them!
To meet demand, and to pave the future for our publishing business, we have embarked on a huge project to automate the production of eBooks. This will allow all our books to be available as hardcopy and for all digital readers at the same time. We will be able to publish more SAS Press books every year and you will be able to get the format of your choice immediately!
We are excited about this project for many reasons. We want to get our content out there quickly. But we are also looking forward to partnering with more of you to publish with us. I hope you will be one of them!
2 Comments
Hi Kathy, this is an interesting article, however as a Safari Books Online subscriber for some time I see very few SAS ebooks coming online at Safari.
I joined the SBO service for the practicality of ebooks and thinking that more and more SAS publications would become available as ebooks, but this just doesn't seem to be the case. In fact there seems to be a decline in the number of publication coming through from SAS onto SBO. Is there a reason for this?
I would be very interested to found out what is happening on this front.
Thanks
David
Thank you for contacting us. I'm delighted to hear from a SAS user that is also a Safari subscriber.
Because the effort involved in taking a book originally published for hardcopy and turning it into an ebook is significant, we have been unable to send as many titles to our partners as we would like.
Currently, we have 54 titles live on Safari, 15 new titles have been placed there this year, and we have 16 new titles under development targeted for Safari; 5 have been sent but are not yet live yet.
By automating our processes, we will be able to deliver every title to each partner as soon as the book is published, with no lag time. It is this goal that is causing us to change our processes. Stay tuned!