Safari Books Online Woes

Safari Books Online (a Proquest eBooks product with technology books, code books, and such from publishers like O’Reilly) somewhat recently launched a new platform.  This new platform is seen by anyone using the collection—be they individuals who bought subscriptions and specific eBooks or libraries who purchased the whole collection and have hundreds of different people using the account every day.  As a result, there are problems we're seeing from our users.

When I log in, I see a page like this:

The Desktop link (what the heck would you think would show in Desktop?) takes you to a page that is totally useless to library users, only to individual subscribers—kind of a “My Account” page.

And when I see the Bookshelf option, I think (as a user) – that will probably show me all the books available, right?  Wrong.  The Bookshelf shows me Favorites – which are books that somehow have miraculously made it onto the Favorites list for the library’s account.  Forgetting the uselessness of having a Favorites section where dozens of libraries are using the same account, it is also extraordinarily puzzling given what happens when I myself try to add a Favorite.

Let’s say that I’m looking at a results list for a search, and I see a book I like (Fixing PowerPoint Annoyances)…

and I click on that Add to Favorites link, I get the following error message, even though the library owns this book.

Similarly, mysteriously some books show up as having bookmarks in them. But when I access a title and add a bookmark, then go back into that book (either in the same session or after logging out and going back in) the bookmark has always disappeared.

So, where are the phantom favorites and bookmarks coming from (an appropriate question for Halloween)? And why include such features in a library subscription, unless you’re going to allow individual users to create profiles within the library’s account? 

Even better, Safari tries to sell me things from within the library's subscription! Any time I’m looking at the individual record for a book, I see something like this, trying to sell me a print copy of the book.

Safari doesn’t link back into the library’s catalog to see if the library has a print copy….no, that would be too sensible and customer-oriented. Instead, this profit-oriented link takes advantage of a library platform to sell other company products.

Overall, this librarian is not so happy.  I have had numerous customers complaining and confused about these issues (as well as the relatively frequent total outages for the product), and rightly so.  And I have no useful answer for them other than agreeing that they are right, and passing the issues on to the company. 

For most of the content in this collection, Safari is the only option.  So, in a monopoly situation, how can librarians effect positive change in the products their users need to use?  I've started by contacting the company both directly and through our consortium (through which we buy the product) and using a blog post like this to perhaps get some more attention paid to the issue.  Anyone else have suggestions, or experiencing the same user frustration and confusion with Safari?