For as long as I have been in Japan, I have always found it difficult to find A) English-language books and B) sufficient free time in which to read them.

Shipping books from overseas has always been time-consuming and costly. Buying books locally is costly, too, and often means putting up with limited selections, especially in the area of technical books—which are the kind I crave most.

Because I work a typical salaryman’s schedule and have an active family life, my only “free” time to read traditional, hard copy books is often when I’m commuting to or from work—which is usually not quality reading time. (For books that are available online, however, I have much more reading time—I am reading something online almost every minute of every business day.)  Although I do consider myself fortunate to have a direct, 30-minute train ride each way, the trains are often overcrowded in the morning (making it difficult to even hold a book, much less read one) and my brain is often worn out in the evening (making it difficult to focus on the subject matter). Also, the trains are almost always noisy, which is a significant distraction. All things considered, I am usually lucky if I can get 20 minutes’ worth of uninterrupted reading done in the hour I spend each day on trains.

Fortunately, neither of these things need to be a problem any more. I’ve just signed up for my own Safari Bookshelf, a service of the O’Reilly Network that allows me to search through the full text of technical books from a wide variety of publishers, and to add the ones that I like to an online “bookshelf” that allows me to fill a specified number of “slots.” (In general, one slot is equivalent to one title, but there are a few exceptions; in my case, I opted for a ten-slot bookshelf, but there are options for larger or smaller ones). The great thing about it is that I can replace some or all of the titles on my shelf with new ones each month. At the rate I buy books, the Safari Bookshelf represents a tremendous savings.

At the moment, my newly created bookshelf contains the following titles, several of which had been waiting on my Amazon.co.jp wishlist for quite some time:

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• Adobe InDesign 2.0 Classroom in a Book ($45.00)
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• Apache The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition ($39.95)
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• Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide ($34.95)
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• Database Design for Mere Mortals ($39.95)
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• Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy ($39.99)
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• MySQL ($49.99)
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• Running Linux, 4th Edition ($44.95)
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• Sams Teach Yourself Apache 2 in 24 Hours ($24.99)
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• The Cathedral & the Bazaar, Revised Edition ($44.95)
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• Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL ($44.95)

Now, if I were to buy all of these books at list price, it would have set me back nearly $410, but the same collection of material (assuming that I pay for an annual subscription) costs me only $160. Also, in addition to being able to draw from these books whenever I need to (so long as they remain in one of my slots), I can also search other Safari Bookshelf titles or replace titles on my bookshelf with different ones as my needs or interests change.

In my personal budget, I generally allow myself the equivalent of $50 a month to spend on books. On average, this works out to one or two new books a month. With my Safari Bookshelf subscription, however, I can get as many as ten new books each month while spending just slightly more than a quarter of my annual personal allowance for books. This is a very compelling advantage.

The Safari Bookshelf is also filled with helpful features that help me remember where I last stopped reading, allow me to bookmark specific sections of the books on my shelf, and allow me to make notes about the books I am reading.

I will be sure to write more about my experiences with Safari as I explore more of it (I’ve only just recently subscribed under the 14-day free trial, so there are many things I have yet to try out), but for now I think it’s a safe bet that I will look to O’Reilly’s Safari Bookshelf first for the technical books on my wishlist.