Safari Books Online is enabling the download of chapter and full-book PDFs to the iPhone and iPod touch.

Safari Books Online, the provider of an on-demand digital library including books and videos for technology and business professionals, has launched Safari Bookbag, which can be installed via the Apple App Store for no additional cost. Safari Books Online is the first online publisher to open their entire library to iPhone and iPod touch users.

"The strategy is to provide mobile access to the contents of Safari Books Online's digital library via an iPhone or iPod touch," said Paige Mazzoni, vice president of marketing at Safari Books Online, Sebastopol, CA. "In this way, our subscribers can download chapters or whole books and read the material on the go, whether or not they have Internet access.

"The target demographic for this application is anyone who uses the iPhone or iPod touch, particularly those with technology or creative professional interests, such as programming, IT management, Web development and design, graphic design or digital photography," she said. "We have completed a comprehensive launch, including email and Web communications, updates to current customers and promotional activities."

Safari Books Online chose to integrate with Apple devices as its first mobile platforms after conducting a survey of its users.

Among the respondents, 50 percent indicated the iPhone or iPod touch was the mobile device they used.

The company plans to continue rapid expansion of its mobile strategy with other devices and readers in the months to come.

Bookbag customers can synch their Apple devices with the "My Downloads" section of their Safari Books Online accounts, which houses PDF versions of books that have been downloaded.

To access titles on the iPhone or iPod touch, consumers can select the chapter of the book they want to download by simply tapping on the title of the book.

With the Bookbag application, any iPod touch or iPhone with Internet access -- Edge, Wi-Fi or 3G -- can automatically transfer chapters of books from the Safari library.

Once the books are downloaded, the PDFs can be read and accessed at any time, even without an Internet connection.

Between the simple Coverflow-based book selection screen to the tap-to-download chapters list and the friendly network access screens, Bookbag brings Safari Books Online into a native reader that takes Apple's design philosophy to heart.

To install Safari Bookbag, consumers can go to http://www.apple.com/itunes/download to download iTunes and then use the Safari Bookbag app link to download Safari Bookbag.

Safari Books Online, founded in 2001 as a joint venture between technology publishers O'Reilly Media Inc. and Pearson Education, is an on-demand digital library delivering content from technology and business authors.

Safari Books Online offers the combined collections of Prentice Hall Professional, O'Reilly Media, Addison-Wesley Professional, Microsoft Press, Sams, Que, Peachpit Press, John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier, lynda.com, Adobe Press, Cisco Press, Sun Microsystems Press, Wharton School Publishing, Apress and Course Technology in one fully searchable database.

Technology professionals, software developers, Web designers and business and creative professionals use Safari Books Online as a resource for research, problem solving, learning and certification training.

Thousands of books, prepublication manuscripts, short documents, articles and instructional videos are available.

Safari Books Online is a business tool that is rapidly changing the way corporate, academic and training organizations access information.

The company is enabling increasingly mobile workforces to get technical and business reference resources anytime and from anywhere.

Safari Books Online offers a range of business-to-business product mixes and pricing programs for every sized organization, as well as business-to-consumer options for individual users.

"Safari Books Online is committed to building out a strategy to provide mobile access on a variety of platforms and devices," Ms. Mazzoni said. "This announcement is in keeping with that overall strategy."

After surveying its subscriber base, the leap to mobile made perfect sense for the company.

"We do not have overall market numbers but in a survey of our users, 81 percent said they read books on mobile devices, offline," Ms. Mazzoni said. "Of those, 46 percent said they use an iPhone or iPod touch, and 45 percent said they do own or plan to own an ebook reader.

"This is a healthy market and appears to be growing rapidly," she said.