The coming shutdown of Book Slut isn’t the only depressing news in the publishing world.
Now, from The Digital Reader, comes word of “massive layoffs” at Safari Books Online and the departure of Andrew Savikas, the CEO.
But keep reading on. While layoffs aren’t fun for anyone and we don’t know all the details, my bet is that Safari is still doing well as a fully owned branch of O’Reilly Media. Savikas says he has left on good terms to be a work-at-home dad.
Safari is an online subscription service for books, videos and training sources offering tens of thousands of titles.
Begun in 2000 as a partnership between O’Reilly and Pearson Technology Group, it was either the pioneer or at least one of the pioneers of the online-book subscription idea. At Safari, the business model was and is vastly superior to the one that doomed Oyster Books. Safari hasn’t bogged itself down with a commitment to paying the retail prices of book rented to subscribers. Furthermore, it has focused on the niche of professional learning for people in technology in business. By contrast, Oyster didn’t specialize. So we are indeed talking apples and oysters, not oysters and oysters.
But is Safari itself now in trouble? Sarah Winge, a spokesperson for O’Reilly, which in 2014 gained full ownership of Safari, is quoted as saying that the changes are just a matter of “integrating the two businesses,” which she describes as “quite complementary.”
Now that O’Reilly and Safari are “one company,” she says, this corporation is “in great shape, and we are excited about the future.”
As with Book Slut, whose founder, Jess Crispen, has not yet revealed the reason for the shutdown, I don’t know all the details at Safari. Winge would not say how many people were being laid off. But based on the business model and demand for products and services of the kind that Safari offers, I would be surprised if the company were in trouble.
Meanwhile I doubt we’ll see Andrew Savikas on the breadline soon. In his explanatory blog post, he writes that the parting happened logically and on friendly terms:
“My wife and I recently welcomed our second child, and events like that are opportunities for deep reflection. It’s a cliché to hear someone say they’ve left a job to ‘spend more time with family,’ but I can say with certainty that sometimes it’s exactly true. Acquisitions mean that roles change — and in this case, as the Safari CEO role went away, the right choice was for me to go along with it.
“For now, I’ll be working on building a life that can give me time to be more present with my kids as they move (so quickly!) through some very important early years.”
He’ll work as an independent consultant and will benefit from his many contacts. He is former vice chair of the influential Book Industry Study Group. I know him slightly from my past participation in O’Reilly’s Tools of Change Conference, of which he was a prime organizer.
The best of luck to you, Andrew!
(Updated at 10:57 a.m., March 13, 2016.)
Related: O’Reilly takes full ownership of Safari Books, from Publishers Weekly.
Who said Safari was in trouble?
I certainly didn’t.
@Nate: Of course you wouldn’t say or think so – I wouldn’t, either. Still, the term “restructuring” is often associated with a company in trouble, especially when a CEO departs. I felt that the fairest thing to O’Reilly and Andrew was to give the whole picture or at least as much of it as I could.