Wow, would be interested to read more about this, could you submit the email maybe as its own post? Even as a text version, I actually love the PragProg, would hate to seem them gone (but I guess it’s a foregone conclusion).
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 bleeding edge stuff that would likely be out of date by the time it makes it to dead paper form.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: