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Comment by akg_67 | Hacker News Reader

Amazon most probably does tons of backend optimization in all its activities.

What I have found more amazing is the selection of books in Amazon "brick-and-mortar" bookstore compared to Barnes & Noble (B&N) bookstore in same Seattle shopping complex previously. I typically visit that shopping complex few times a month. Every time, I have visited Amazon bookstore, I tend to pickup couple of books to browse that I find interesting. When I used to visit B&N in same complex previously, it was rare for me to pickup books to browse in repeat visits. Amazon is able to achieve in 1/4th of the one floor what B&N couldn't do with books on two floors, make me pick up books on repeat visits. Amazon seems to refresh books more often in its store. Amazon might also be using the browsing/purchasing habits of users living in the area to determine what books to stock at the store.

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The amazon bookstore, while nice, has like a non-existent tech section.

Is anyone actually still buying dead wood tech books?

I get dead wood for trickier tech books where I have to flip back and forth a bunch.

Fair enough!

Apologies if I seemed flippant -- things are changing so quickly nowawdays that apart from a few core texts on algorithms and programming languages, I've pretty much stopped expanding my library. It seems to be stackexchange and blog posts across the board now.

I suspect I'll pay for this choice sooner or later...

I avoid tech books on anything that's changing quickly - like frameworks. It's a waste of paper and ink, IMO. I get those in e-book format instead. I do however buy dead-tree versions of stuff that won't change fast or that I expect to flip back and forth.

Yes, and from amazon.com too

You can build perfectly fine cpu out of wood nowadays

I buy, on average, 3-4 books a month (from Amazon, of course) and I NEVER buy e-books.

Yes, but only books that won't be out of date in a year, so no programming language or framework specific books.

I did buy a copy of The C Programming Language a couple of years back though, but that's just because I feel like it's just one of those books you must have.

Yep - as others have pointed out, good for flipping back and forth. Also, do pick up language/framework specific ones for initial learning, then head online to pick up on the changes/other aspects.

I think if it's a "concepts" book like SICP, a book explaining the patterns of the Erlang OTP framework, etc it's still worth a real purchase. If it's "Programming Framework version X", why bother unless it's really cheap? Though to be fair, a lot of projects have awful docs which make books necessary.

Surprisingly I've actually increased my spending in hardcover books since getting a Kindle. Kindle is for travel / free books / classics. Hardcover for sitting at home in a comfy chair. Regardless of what people say, physical paper is still easier on my eyes.

Much as I love my e-readers, paper tech books and other textbooks are really still the only way to go simply because you can't easily flip back and forth between pages to cross-reference things or find specific information by flipping to a chapter quickly.

For fiction and any other type of linear reading material though, e-readers have been a godsend.

Tech books are the only thing I read on paper. I love free tech books, but honestly I'd rather pay to get the physical copy, just for ease of reference. The only time I enjoy digital copies of technical books is when copy and paste works, which it doesn't on Kindle books.

I disagree. Navigation non-linearly through electronic versions of texts is much easier than having to fan through the pages to look for that one phrase or code snippet you saw 3 months ago. Search and bookmarks...I've seen this in PDFs for years though I don't have much experience working with the newer e-book specific formats.

You'd be amazed how quickly you can find something in a book (or in a few cases for me, a blueprint) when you can just hit F3 or ctrl-f and search for it.

If you know precisely what you're looking for, I would agree that direct search is great; heaven knows I've wished there was a way to grep a book often enough.

However, I often find myself in situations where I don't know precisely the term to search for and am simply browsing to see if there is some information applicable to the problem I'm attempting to solve. That's where the ability to flip rapidly back and forth shines.

I disagree, having my hand in two pages so I look back and forth is faster than ctrl-f.

You can open the same PDF twice...

I like the Kindle iOS app, which now allows you to 'flip' through pages by dragging a bar.

These are the only kind of physical books I buy. I can read a novel or most non-fiction on my Kindle just fine. But the Kindle sucks for quickly jumping through pages, or pages with images, charts, or equations. Also you can't lend the majority of Kindle books, and even then it's only to someone else's Kindle account. I love lending out my tech books to friends. I just lent my copy of Mastering Regular Expressions to someone in my office for like the tenth time.

Until I can find a decent reader that doesn't hurt my eyes[1] and does ePub and PDF, yep, I'm buying paper books. Having the ability to highlight, draw, and add post-it like notes would be a bonus since I do that with real books too.

1) the current Apple trend to get rid of all PDFs has made my Mac time a pain given I cannot get good print outs of documentation or use it on something other than an iPad.

Unsurprisingly, Amazon can probably help you there too. The Kindle is an excellent device for reading.

Last I check, ePub isn't a supported format.

If you email it to your Kindle, it often gets converted fine.

I was my understanding that anything with tables is problematic. Also, did Amazon stop charging for conversion?

There are some new e readers which do both ePub and PDF. A quick search turned up a few like the Nook GlowLight+, and a couple Kobos. Amazon's offerings don't do native ePub, but they (and others) make it trivial to email or upload an ePub and convert it to mobi and deliver to your device.

I can relate with the sentiment on paper books though. It's quite great being able to quickly flip back and forth to several places, or place notes throughout. I've had luck with the highlighting feature on my Kindle, which gives a decent interface for going back and looking at all the things I've highlighted; I've developed the habit of highlighting all the important parts in a book and going back and re-reading just the highlighted bits, which has helped tremendously. Unfortunately, highlighting across pages is rather aggravating.

I would have bought a Kobo but I keep hearing the PDF support is problematic. I keep hoping, but LCDs seem to be good enough for the majority.

Since Amazon ranks kindle books separate from hard copy, you can see for yourself!

Yes, they do not require electricity to function.

You should try Elliot Bay

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