It went un-noticed here, I think, but The Pragmatic Bookshelf recently fired most of its staff and are taking on no new books. In the email they sent to authors, they quoted a 40% YoY fall in non-fiction sales, industry-wide.
The publishing industry veterans I've worked with told me it was even more incredible during the height of the dotcom boom: book sales in the 100,000 copy range was not that rare.
Today I can only think of two truly technical book stores that still exist: The MIT Press Bookstore in Cambridge, MA and Ada Books in Seattle, WA. The latter, while a delightful store, has relegated the true technical book section to the backroom, which unfortunately doesn't seem to get refreshed too often (though, part of the beauty of this is it still has many of the weird old technical books that used to be everywhere).
B&N, and Borders, are how I learned to code. Directionless after college, I thought, hey, why not learn how to make websites? And I'd spend a lot of time after work reading books at these stores (and yes, buying too).
Half price books and a few other book stores lulled me back a few times, but nonfiction books are kept around mostly as eye candy at this point.
Now I can't even walk in and browse what books the various departments are using for classes, anymore. Everything is now behind bars and completely inaccessible.
Then in a three month period in late Spring 2000 all the programming books disappeared. Then my choice was between Amazon with quick delivery and the local store with a slower delivery and a higher price. So been buying from Amazon ever since and I can't remember the last time I have visited a bookstore.
I was a developer in the 90s before Netscape even came out. I didn't have a computer at home and dialup barely existed. If you wanted to do computer stuff you had to read. If you wanted to try a library you had to buy a CD from a bookstore or mail in an order which would get posted to you.
When I think about this, I get a little bit scared. Imagine books going away, even if it's just the subcategory of technical books.
The printed word has been around for a long time. The number of things that have been printed has always gone up. It really bothers me that that's changing.
PDFs and websites are no substitute for printed paper bound in a cover. PDFs and websites are a fallback when the preferred media isn't available, they are not supposed to be the preferred media. All of the of the reasons that people have given over the years are applicable when it comes to why paper is superior for this.
But a lot of is also in blogs and (video) tutorials. As well as Stack Overflow.
And all very searchable.
The old brick-of-paper approach to tech manuals just isn't a thing any more. I don't particularly miss it.
It was, if you think about, usually a slow and inefficient way to present information - often better at presenting what was possible than how to do make it happen.
that, i feel, is the chilling aspect to this situation. does the lack of new books explaining what's possible, imply that our society's opportunites for growth are dwindling?
*Edit: spell correct kills me!
I bought 2 books even though I won't have time to read them anytime soon.
Hopefully they'll find a way to keep going.
I myself spend around 200-300 usd on books every year. but I haven't bought a physical book in almost a decade. a pdf is perfectly fine. just sell it to me without DRM and have content thats worth the premium over wading through blogs.
How can these companies move forward and update their business model? Personally, I pay for manning's subscription. $24/month all you can eat. I would love more of these publishers switching to a netflix style model.
I consume a lot of short form technical content via blogs. would love a site where I can find medium written content with editorial oversight and quality control for technical correctness. obviously this costs money and it would be worth it to pay for that. I already do with manning. most of the content I consume are MEAPS. bleeding edge stuff that would likely be out of date by the time it makes it to dead paper form.
This would be advantageous to the publishers as well. this shifts the focus to put the content on the web and mobile in ways that are easy to access. The publishers also get data on what gets consumed informing what technical resources to commission.
They take up valuable screen space, it is annoying to scroll to the sections you need. Yeah yeah some PDFs have the side navigation thing. Most don't
With a book I can put in those little flags to bookmark sections, I can easily riffle the pages and scan for the chapter I need, I can hand write in the margins
I often need 2 or 3 books open to different sections, I like keeping them on my desk so I can glance at them when I need to
I've probably cracked $1000 spent on books this year.
I suppose a remarkable would be another route but… they are pricey.
I got a remarkable pro, and it's just slightly better than screen. Being able to annotate books is actually a welcomed addition, and the screen is pretty decent. But flipping screen is slow (compared to a printed book), and going back and forth between pages is a hassle. Until we have the speed of a tablet (read: instant), with the screen quality of an e-ink, I don't think I'll voluntarily retire printed books.
Now, I have an O'Reilly subscription (two actually, through school and ACM), but the app is sadly horrendous, as OP mentioned. Hard to believe this is actually their core business.
https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=46179347&goto=item%3Fi...
How are you able to download the videos to begin with?
If you're an OMSCS student, most courses offer the download through Ed or Canvas. Usually it's a big zip file under the first lesson, but I've seen some available in the shared Dropbox. I've seen this for GIOS, ML4T, ML, and a few others. Or you can just reach out to the TAs.
If you're not a student, then it gets a bit tricky. Some courses are available as YouTube playlists or on Coursera, but then it becomes a hassle to download and piece together hundreds of individual files.
Feel free to drop me a note (email in my profile), or open an issue on github.
Seems like I'm stuck using Ed.
So yeah, it's a bit of a hassle, and but you can probably still piece it together for some/most courses that are publicly available.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@manx6092/playlists [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/OMSCS/comments/zjbh8i/cs_6200_lectu...
Out of an abundance of curiosity, I discovered an archive of your comment, which I didn’t myself make, but I link here for purposes of discussion:
Or is it because LLMs know everything that is in books, so people don't feel compelled to learn any more themselves?
LLMs are super helpful for learning, but without the foundation of a true textbook at your side they will very easily go off the rails into a world of imagination.
The web got a little better, and what drove brainshare and usage was a good experience getting started with reasonable defaults and good docs to get you started. API design is also much better these days- I was trying to find some examples of how unintuitive say MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes- big in the win9x days) apis were, but a lot of those docs seem to have disappeared- here is a stackoverflow/experts-exchange links that show how non-intuitive it was: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3255207/window-handle-in... https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/10018203/How-to-g...
Motif on the Unix side of things was a bit better, but not much. You really needed a good book to walk you through things in a more understandable way.
Damn few of them.
I'm thinking the "industry" will contract a lot, but there will always be a niche for deep "real books" on a subject. It will just be much smaller.
And then, it seems to be a real issue amongst some people to ask, "why should I learn X, when LLMs already know it?" Not unlike, "why should I learn to divide, when we have calculators?" but on a grander scale.
There is the problem of "I don't know what I don't know" that a course can solve for you. An LLM can sort of do that, but you have to take its word for it, and it does it pretty much strictly worse at the moment (but is much more flexible).
I'm less optimistic. Already 20+ years ago many people complained if you pointed them to books which answered their questions in depth. The standard reply was "just tell me how to solve this particular problem" instead.
From the people I know who wrote or co-wrote books, the way you make money is in future interview processes.
I don't know if they still do it, but when I interviewed for Google, they had a self-ranking system of how competent you are in each technology, and the only way to get the top score was phrased something like "I wrote the book on it (yes, an actual book)".
The worlds moved on from valuing the latest DSL and additions to the Linux kernel. Just a fad marketed at GenX and older Millennials.
SaaS is something tech billionaires need to exist. It's not something humanity needs. Not at the scale of the 2010s ZIRP fueled mania, anyway. Employers were using subscriptions to O'Reilly as a perk. No budget for perks in the AI and economic austerity era.
Maps app, communication apps, media consumption are all most of the billions of smartphone users care about.