If you’re anything like me you’ve got loads of huge old books on long dead or outdated technology gathering dust on your bookshelves, a few of which you’ve probably not even read more than half way.

You’ve probably got a couple more books you plan on buying soon? And there’s also a pretty good chance that a large proportion of all of these books have some strange animal on the front and are published by the O’Reilly network. Well if so, you have to try out the O’Reilly Safari Bookshelf

Safari Bookshelf is like an online library featuring a large chunk of the O’Reilly catalogue (both past & current). Every month you can place a set number of books into your bookshelf (10 on the standard subscription), and you can swap these each month. At only $20 a month it’s pretty good value (one ‘real’ book normaly costing about 3 times this!), and at the moment they have a free one month trial too.

I only joined today but have already added “Head First Design Patterns”, “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web” & “Mind Performance Hacks” to my bookshelf, all titles I’ve looked at but never got round to buying. Now all I have to do is find the time to read them!