Sarah Houghton-Jan at Librarian in Black wrote about problems using Safari Books Online in a library setting. I left a comment saying that this was unfortunate, because we have Safari at work and I really like it. (Safari is a service from O’Reilly and Pearson offering e-books from a number of publishers, mostly on computers and technology.)

This prompted the following note:

Hello, I read your comment on librarianinblack blog about Safari. You mentioned that you appreciated it and thought there might be a problem with the Proquest Interface. How does your library get Safari? Directly from Safari, then? And, it is not a proquest subscription purchase?

Thanks, -DN Dussan (left in comments on another post)

Well, I don’t have a “library” per se; I work at a small consulting firm with a handful of people, so we just have individual accounts, which are available directly from Safari (safari.oreilly.com). At www.safaribooksonline.com, I noticed that there’s some information on corporate licensing and libraries, although they’re pretty silent about the fact that library access comes through ProQuest. As it turns out, ProQuest has a deal for exclusive distribution of Safari content to academic, public, and school libraries.

So, I guess the only recourse for dissatisfaction with ProQuest’s interface is to appeal to ProQuest. Then again, it can’t hurt to contact Safari directly with your concerns as well, because from what I’ve seen, O’Reilly is pretty committed to offering a useful, usable product. They seem to be quite interested in the academic market, because they also offer SafariU, a service for professors to remix and mashup books to create the ideal coursepack/textbook for their courses.