The "book" is dead

He's definitely wrong about this point. A book proposes answers to questions you didn't even know you had. A book can save you the trouble and time of searching for a thousand different queries. There is definitely value in having the information logically organized, all in one place, with the same tone, and the same assumptions about the reader's level.

Q&A sites are complimentary to books, not a replacement.

When people talk about the death of a particular genre of books or the publishing industry, I am reminded of books of poetry written by living authors.

The poetry book has been dead from a publishing perspective for a number of years. A large portion of single author poetry books are printed as the result of contests, many of which have an entry or 'reading' fee. Great poems are found easily on the internet, and almost no one speaks of poem piracy because the number of words is often quite small.

Despite the arrival of poetry book doomsday, it's still easy to stuff a bookcase full of little poetry chapbooks. There are poetry books printed at fine art presses with complex bits of vellum, embossing and debossing. It's even a friendlier industry now that large publishers have all but ignored it.

It sucks that it's not so easy to make a job of it anymore. However, lack of a traditional publishing industry is unlikely to kill the technical book.

(edit: repetition)

Is the technical book dead? Well, it's declining but I wouldn't say dead yet. The problem with the market for technical books is that there are tons of them. Everywhere. Some are good, many are bad and there are a few 'classics' (Knuth, Stephens etc.). I think the problem with technical books (in our spheres) is that they don't integrate with the reader's workflow. The reader is often at a computer when reading a programming book. Switching between the computer screen and book page can be mentally expensive compared to having it open on the screen next to you. The pirated versions of books (particularly epubs) tend to be better indexed, can be copied and pasted and more easily integrated into your daily life. These are the challenges that technical books face. The pirated versions often provide a better user experience. It's the same (or rather similar) with DVDs.

Now taking that a little further to the title. The book (in general) is not dead, very far from it. I took an ereader on holiday last year and read through about 12 books in 4 days. It was the only piece of tech that I took (I like to unplug). It doesn't feel the same, but as with comparing FLACs to Vinyl the experience makes up for it in it's accessibility. Having said that, I still prefer to read books where I can. Having a Star Trek TNG style reading experience is great, but having the paperware feels an irrationally superior experience.

I think it fits into more motivational type of book than anything else. At the end of the day, it's like Starcraft casters: there are guys like HD, Husky, and Day9 but I don't think they ever see themselves as competitive (while the users seem to think the exact opposite) because users will always want to watch more of them. just like I would never see something like Mixergy as competitive because the two things are so complimentary, plus it seems like there isn't really a lot of reading material for early stage founders anyway. Mixergy, StartupFoundry, and Founders at Work might be the three things I'd go to, thinking off the top of my head.

I want to believe that if what you write has some value to it, people are willing to pay. I didn't pay for Photoshop licenses until I was about 18, when I could actually afford it, so I pirated it until I could. There was enough value that it allowed me to pay for it over time.

As someone interested in HTML and CSS, the books available are so unfathomably meagre with useful, new content - the newest books are basically even worse. There's this culture of making CSS books that largely repeat themselves with very random compositions. Often, they make a site and slap on some CSS3. I don't recommend learning HTML and CSS from anywhere else than HTML Dog, CSS Pivot, and just playing around with your own experiments. It boggles the mind that this can really be the case - CSS hasn't changed a lot in many years, and the big difference is mainly that there's a larger chance that a browser will support your code.

Having said that, there still are purposes for some books. Just look at the Python debate. Getting into Python is a pain in the ass compared to HTML/CSS. I am currently annoyed that I can't find an up-to-date Django book, and DjangoBook.com is not a very good resource - it seems to suffer from the wiki syndrome where a lot of co-editors have removed any sense of style and red thread to follow.

In the review, Jeremy Bowers discusses his own experience trying to learn Haskell over the past few years from the random bits and pieces that float about the web and how the careful development of ideas in this book "blew what turned out to be my rickety assemblage of concepts apart and replaced them with a solid understanding of what is going on with them, and why."

We tend to forget that learning is not the same as carrying around a giant reference book. It's a painstakingly linear process where leaps of understanding happen only when a solid foundation is in place. Books and the linear style of books will always be with us, but to compete with instant search writers must learn to teach.

Is the book really dead? The post's title is poorly chosen. Until e-books come anywhere near the experience of reading a physical copy of say À la recherche du temps perdu, the book isn't dead.

Clearly the post isn't about Proust, and I hope I don't come off as an ass for being picky about the title.

The post is about technical (especially computer-related) literature, and I think it's inevitable that this genre will suffer greatly. I think it will be supplanted by more interactive alternatives, which is great. There is something strange about a paper book full of source code, isn't there?

And let's be honest: 90% of the books on software engineering (and perhaps on computer-related subjects in general) that should never have gone through a printer.