Rough Cuts - Publishing on the edge

Rough Cuts is a new service from Safari Books Online that gives you early access to content on cutting-edge technologies -- before it's published. It lets you literally read the book as it is being written.

Intrigued? I know I was. Rough Cuts at present has four titles covering AJAX, Flickr, Ruby and Ruby On Rails. To give you an idea of how this works let's take a look at the Ruby On Rails title. Although the book isn't scheduled to be published in traditional format until May, you can already access it now - four months earlier! Impressed? What about the Ruby Cookbook, which isn't going to be published until September! It's a really interesting concept, but not only is it interesting it's also cost-effective, as you can get a much better price on the content. The example they gave in one newsletter was:

1. Get online access to "Ajax Hacks" now, plus a copy of the print book when it's released in March, for only $32.99 (price for the print book alone will be $29.99). 2. Online-only access to the Rough Cuts version of "Ajax Hacks" for $14.99. 3. Pre-order only the print book, for $19.95.

Not bad when you consider that the listed price for the same title on Amazon is approx. 25 euro Unfortunately the shipping costs push the price up considerably (if you are living in Ireland anyway) but the idea is still very cool