O’Reilly Media has teamed with Dropbox.com, a popular cloud storage service, to offer O’Reilly e-book consumers the ability to sync the e-books in their accounts with any digital reading device they may own. Dropbox is a free (with 2GB of free storage) and for-pay service that can be accessed via the web or through mobile apps for smartphones and tablets.

A Dropbox account allows a user to access content stored in the cloud service easily from anywhere. O’Reilly Media launched its new service with Dropbox at the end of June and while it is still in beta, the service attracted more than 7,000 authorizations in the first few days and Joe Wikert, O’Reilly Media general manager and publisher, told PW he was pleased with the initial results. Wikert said the majority of the new authorizations are “requesting full synchronization,” he said, which means they are syncing their entire O’Reilly e-book library with Dropbox.

Wikert also said the new service was generating enthusiastic discussions on Twitter. Wikert said the new Dropbox service is “yet another reason publishers should abandon DRM [O’Reilly e-books are not protected by digital rights management software]. Being DRM-free means our customers content can not only be read on whatever device they prefer but also stored and accessed in the cloud. Good luck creating such a compelling user experience if your content is wrapped in DRM!"