Comment by jonbodner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonbodner | Hacker News Reader

I'm the author of O'Reilly's "Learning Go". Here are the last 13 months of paperback book sales:

- Mar 2026: 124

- Feb 2026: 140

- Jan 2026: 157

- Dec 2025: 306

- Nov 2025: 484

- Oct 2025: 218

- Sep 2025: 176

- Aug 2025: 136

- Jul 2025: 317

- Jun 2025: 230

- May 2025: 237

- Apr 2025: 165

- Mar 2025: 367

Sales are certainly down, but it has gone up and down in the past.

Since the 1st edition came out in 2021, it has sold roughly 20,000 copies (about 10,500 English paperback copies, 3,800 ebooks, and 6,700 translated copies). The 2nd edition came out in 2024 and has sold roughly 13,000 copies (about 8,300 English paperback copies, about 3,000 ebooks, and about 1,600 translated copies).

Most of the money comes from O'Reilly's online platform, not from book sales. That has been declining lately, partially because the latest edition is now over 2 years old, but also I suspect that people are cancelling O'Reilly subscriptions and just relying on LLMs (which have indexed all of the books and used pirated copies to do so).

I cancelled my O'Reilly subscription because it's cheaper for me to buy the books from the publisher. I go through one book every few months. I thought I'd go through more with unlimited access but I didn't. $539.88 a year vs maybe $140-$200 I spend on books (I take advantage of discount codes when they come up).

I also like to go back to books. I cannot do that with the O'Reilly platform when a subscription ends.

I hear you and agree on the unlicensed training point - it is a form piracy.

I'm similar, I think perhaps it's a generational thing which slightly modified the title in a pedantic way.

The people who "grew up" with text books still crack new ones and old ones.

The current generation turning 18-21 don't.

It surprises me because I'm often asked why I knew X or Y odd perhaps esoteric fact or design pattern. Usually it's because I came across it in a book interested in something else.

It's that peripheral knowledge that is being lost when people use LLMs, and quick start guides.

Historically you'd have a team where skill, knowledge and experience was very variable but each person often brought another piece of the puzzle to a team.

Increasingly people have narrow knowledge "bases".

Does it matter? Perhaps not but it definitely has taken some of the joy of discussing problems and solutions out of my working life.

> It surprises me because I'm often asked why I knew X or Y odd perhaps esoteric fact or design pattern. Usually it's because I came across it in a book interested in something else.

It was like this in the days when the primary shortcut was StackOverflow as well. People who are allergic to RTFM treat things that are covered in the docs as "esoteric" knowledge because they never read anything except as a shortcut to solving their immediate problem.

I think the stats are clear that reading is in decline in general, though. I'm sure LLMs will add to this much like YouTube has.

Surely people still use textbooks for formal education? This has to be something that happens later.

Professors putting textbooks in the syllabus and students reading those texts aren't necessarily the same.

This study tracked study resource usage in 2021 and mentions a study in 2006.

In 2006 medical students spent 10.8hours per week studying with textbooks, on 2021 4.2hours.

So under 40% the textbook usage as 2006. That's a fairly precipitous decline and it's pre-LLMs being mainstream. I down chatgpt 4/5 have sent the students back to the library!

It mentions question banks have expanded as have online resources. Also learning style has changed from lecture based to problem based learning.

I can't say this is objectively bad. But that I'm sure it contributes to narrowed knowledge bases.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8651945/

I actually require the book the Jon Bodner was talking about in a class I teach every couple of years. The students who do well (the ones you would want to hire) will read it, the others will skim or try to summarize it

The last three years more or less none of my students have bought the textbook for the subject. That is pretty mind blowing. In turn they expect a complete textbook from my lecture notes, which isn't possible.

I get that textbooks are getting more expensive though.

>which have indexed all of the books and used pirated copies to do so

Funnily enough, people on HN often do not consider this an issue, like at all... I wonder how they'd think about it if they had created something (meaningful) that was subjected to this. I love Go and learned it a lot in the past 2 years but ultimately put it down in favor of more "batteries included" solutions as I don't trust myself enough as a dev to confidently handle concurrency in Go. Still, it's a beautiful language and if I ever come back I hope I can still find books about it, as I hate using AI for learning.

I have a different impression, that the folks here are divided in this issue, with a half being AI maximalists saying it's a necessary evil while the other half condemning such practices, maybe not as much as to protect copyright per se, but because there are two different measures here. While teenagers get ridiculous fines for sharing MP3, big corp gets the free pass for stealing data on a industrial scale.

If AI was public domain and free for everyone, I would have less issues with it (not saying no issues). But yeah, the only people actually benefiting from this are big tech corps who actively destroy society since over a decade now.

The argument about the ability to self host doesn't really make sense to me given that most of society can not even afford RAM at the moment. So all these big tech frontier models should be public domain.

> because of economic pressures

Self-hosting isn't relevant here anyway. When discussing the hoovering up of information irrespective of licences to produce the model, where the model is finally run isn't significant.

You might not be paying the industry pirates-at-scale to run a model on their hardware, but you are still using the same information, irrespective of the same desires of its creators, the same way, just in a different location.

Heck, local hosting might even be making the situation worse if people are trying to train their own model because they are then likely to be scraping data too, and becoming part of the army of bots that are pushing hosting costs up and forcing everyone to use tricks like PoW scripts that can inconvenience human readers as much as the scrapers.

> You might not be paying the industry pirates-at-scale to run a model on their hardware, but you are still using the same information, irrespective of the same desires of its creators, the same way, just in a different location.

For individual use I personally think it's ok. Access to information shouldn't be penalized or regulated, but distribution should. So in this case it's relevant where a bootleg model is run.

And another half being copyright abolitionists like me who don't care about AI at all but see copyright as essentially a societal fiction that even if it was useful in the past is now no longer, or rather, only useful to big corporations to throw their weight around like Disney who lobbied the government to implement their infamous Mickey Mouse laws with ridiculous copyright term limits.

I didn't want to go into this topic, but in right here with you, I'm an information access anarchist.

I agree with you to an extent, but I think that when people profit from a work (e.g. by using it to train a proprietary AI that they charge people to use) they should share the profit with the author of the work.

So I think Anna's Aarchive is fine. OpenAI is not.

That's why I believe in open weight or even open source AI models. If you're gonna train you might as well democratize access to everyone, not the faux "democratization" that OpenAI and Anthropic talk about where only they control access.

> > which have indexed all of the books and used pirated copies to do so

> Funnily enough, people on HN often do not consider this an issue, like at all...

That is far from true - opinion is quite divided, perhaps even close to 50/50. It sometimes seems that the opinion is skewed massively towards the positive because there are a lot more “look what I did with GenAI” stories because “yeah, I'm not doing that because… here's what I did the old way” doesn't catch interest in the same manner.

This is one of the (several) reasons I'm doing my level best to avoid using the tools - I don't want to pay in to the companies that have run ripshod over everyone's work because they can¹. This is a rather risky position to take in a company where the up-aboves have all but said “get with AI or get left behind”, but quite frankly at the moment “redundancy” isn't a scary word for me².

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[1] Take from a few (i.e. download a couple of TV shows) and it is piracy making you liable for huge fines or even prison time, take from practically everyone (hoover up all their published writing irrespective of licence, gum up their servers with your badly written, or well written but deliberately badly behaved, scraper, etc…) and that is perfectly valid for training purposes.

[2] I appreciate that for many this is not the case, and because of economic pressures they might have to compromise on their feelings if they have the same opinions as I do on GenAI.

>That is far from true - opinion is quite divided

That might be true if you look further into it. I am a casual frontpage reader and the frontpage usually is plastered with AI stuff. Either new bullshit benchmarks, AI workflows, AI editor updates, AI company did something bad (again), or cool(?) projects people vibecoded. I also had arguments about AI used for art on here before and my personal experience usually is people defending their slop art.

> That might be true if you look further into it.

You don't have to look much further into it. If you aren't making that much effort it is hardly anyone else's fault that you've got an inaccurate impression of how things are.

> Funnily enough, people on HN often do not consider this an issue, like at all...

I didn't have a problem with it when it was Aaron Swartz, not sure why I should have a problem with it when others do it.

Aaron Swartz never did whatever it was he was going to do. He was caught and hounded to death before that.

But he was working with scientific papers— the outputs of public institutions— and his likely goal was releasing them to the public. What proprietary AI companies have done in training LLMs on every book in existence is nothing like that.

The strange thing is he picked a fight with a store of humanities papers rather than scientific ones.

JSTOR holds content from lots of journals including in the sciences. It's not only humanities papers.

A lot of what they have done is the reverse. They have used a lot of such publicly funded information (and a lot of other freely available information) to train LLMs that are proprietary.

1) those were scientific papers; the authors weren't getting paid either way (unless book authors making a living from them)

2) more importantly, Swartz wasn't building a business empire on the pirated data, and charging access

I don't see how the two are even remotely similar

A few years ago (before LLMs were as good as they are today) I wanted an LLM to do a RAG like memory on all the books I own. My dream was that every book I purchased would go into my LLM making it better but also giving me a reference back to the text to look up and help me get better.

Honestly I didn't expect LLMs to progress so fast. Now it just seems like an unnecessary solution to a problem that no longer exists.

> I wonder how they'd think about it if they had created something (meaningful) that was subjected to this.

I used to write books in the past (all obsolete since, well, two decades+ now) and I'm totally fine with piracy: people who are pirating content are typically not those who are going to pay for it anyway.

As a sidenote I'd really wish that state resources spent fighting bad actors in society was first uses to catch and imprison rapists and the likes and not chasing pirates sailing the digital high-seas but I digress...

Priorities.

>I used to write books in the past (all obsolete since, well, two decades+ now) and I'm totally fine with piracy

Thats why I wrote meaningful. Two decade old books are depending on the topic rarely still meaningful (even if they might've been at the time of publishing). Talking about non-fiction here, as there's a ton of old but still relevant fiction out there. Nonetheless, if you would have published these last year or whatever, I think you'd think differently about it if your sales broke down by 50%+ due to AI.

I'd rather not have copyright at all, as I said in another comment it's not useful anymore. Information should instead just be free for everyone.

Yours is a good book (got both editions myself), but sadly language learning books will be hit the hardest by AI. Partly it’s what you said regarding copyright washing, but the other big reason is that people will code less; I am writing little to no golang and am prompting it instead. The book is still useful to me, since I want to continue to understand what’s happening, review code, etc, however I expect that my kind of software engineer will be in the minority in the future.

If you publish a 3rd edition and I’m not replaced by AI by then, I’ll buy it. :)

On other topics, using AI can fill some gaps, but books summarizing years of hard-won knowledge are priceless. NoStarch is amazing when it comes to such resources. They have an upcoming book on Linux kernel Memory Management for example, the classic Linux tome from Kerrisk and very specialized security books.

On the other hand I cancelled my O’Reilly sub because I didn’t read enough to make it worth the price and now I purchase DRM-free e-books individually, as needed.

It's also relative to the employment numbers.

Companies are shrinking body counts, so you have less buyers of programming books.

2 of May 2026 is me! Learning Go is such a great book.

what's so good about it? I bought it as well, but I have yet to start it (I'm stuck in some other books for now).

Thank you for your excellent book.

Your book is highly recommended in the Go community.

I will definitely be reading it once I finish "The Go programming language".

This has nothing to do with the article posted or anything, I was just curious... who gets to pick the animal on the book cover? Do you (the author) get to pick, or does the publisher (O'Reilly) pick?

Do you mean the animal in general, or what specific image? For Go specifically, it would be very surprising if it was not a gopher! Ok, Python is obviously even more closely associated with the snake, but a gopher has been the Go mascot from the very beginning (the original design being drawn by the wife of one of the language's co-creators)...

I meant in general.

For whatever reason, I forgot that Go uses a gopher as its mascot. But like, their PHP books don't use an elephant.

I dunno, I was just curious if the author could pick an animal to be on the cover, or if it wasn't their choice.

For Go it had to be a Gopher (as it is the mascot for the language). My editor showed me the artwork and I approved it.

This is not a jab at you (or your book), But I always assumed O'Reilly's per book sales would be significantly larger, like 4 figures at the minimum

Yeah. I don’t think people are aware of how few books are purchased. At this moment, Learning Go is 45,855 on Amazon US across all physical books. This is in the top few percent of book sales. The number tends to bounce between the 50,000s and the 30,000s, but sometimes slips higher or lower. One or two sales in a week moves a book quite a bit.

Aside from any downward trend attributable to LLMs, technical book sales were always lower than most people would have imagined.

I've known a few authors who published with O'Reilly and other major publishers and most told me that they made less than minimum wage in the end. There were other benefits, such as increased name recognition and credibility that let them charge more as consultants, but the direct proceeds from writing a technical book seldom paid off even two decades ago.

In general I get that, but O'Reilly has enough prestige/recognition that I assumed they'd be the top outliers, if they don't break the thousands, I assume basically no one does in the field (Barring books for beginners, that have a significantly larger potential buyer pool)

I still enjoy buying paper books and reading them. There is something different about having something physical.

I bought 3 programming books last month including this one. I really enjoy “Learning Go” over the official go book.

Just want to say this is quite informative and helpful, thank you for the transparency.

Your book was my path to Go. Thank you! Having a physical book means much to me.

How do you feel about these LLMs potential piracy of your book?

It’s not potential, it’s actual. There are court cases and settlements and everything. I’ll be getting a little money from Anthropic.

As for how I feel, I think that LLM companies are incredibly short sighted. If I was them, I’d be funding newspapers, non fiction writers, fiction writers, and artists in general in exchange for the exclusive rights to index. They get content to improve their models and the world gets new knowledge and art. But considering the public good is passé and LLMs have done pretty well by stealing everything. This might be why I’m not a billionaire.

Might also be because of Anna’s Archives

I appreciate your response, it's great seeing real data and getting to form opinions on it this way.

hi Jon!

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