> who bothers to steal books these days when you can go to Stack Overflow or a web forum or, yes, even Google, type a question, and get an answer?
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.
Absolutely. Today, if I need to know about a specific CSS technique, I can Google it. A few years ago, when I was clueless about CSS, I didn't know where to start. So I read "CSS: The Definitive Guide." It walked me through why CSS exists, all the things it can do, and best practices. I would never have known the questions to ask without such a a well-organized guide.
Any time I want to learn a new topic, I get a book. And, incidentally, I still like paper books, because when I'm reading on the couch with one, there are no distractions. A computer offers too many other things to do besides read.
Books may change forms and distribution models, but there will always be a need for well-organized and thorough books.
I still like paper books, because when I'm reading on the couch with one, there are no distractions. A computer offers too many other things to do besides read.
Another thing that you can't yet do on the computer is highlight. I highlight important sections as I read technical books and it improves my comprehension immensely. As an additional benefit, when I come back to the book, I have to spend much less time hunting around for the information I need - the things that I've found valuable in the past are already made prominent.
Kindles have built-in support for highlighting and annotations, although using the buttons to highlight is surely slower than using a physical highlighter. If you're just highlighting important passages and not every other sentence (as some people are wont to do), it shouldn't be a problem.
Highlighting is very easy, even superior on the iPad. I highlight extensively when I'm reading PDFs in the GoodReader app, but unlike a physical book I can export the marked-up PDF back to my PC and easily index, sort, or modify them en masse.
I agree completely except: I now prefer my Kindle. Pictures and code suck, it's true, so sometimes I look at the book file on Calibre (and there's a Windows app as well for it), but I really, really like having everything I need in a small volume that I can take anywhere. I can annotate and search and.... Well, I'll stop gushing now.
Agreed. Most web sites are summaries, indexes, databases. Blogs. Not in-depth treatments of a subject. In fact, the very idea that the watered-down free pablum provided on the web is a substitute for knowledge is frightening. Similar to the notion that sound bytes are a suitable replacement for indepth reporting, which we used to hear criticised but now seems to be accepted.
Exactly; they serve two very different purposes. Reference books are dead, perhaps. But if I want a thorough introduction to a topic, I'd much rather sit down with a good book. My attention span increases significantly when I'm not sitting in front of a computer with a web browser open.
depends on what kind of book you are talking about; Q&A sites have largely replaced the 'reference' book. Do you remember last time you looked something up in a paper dictionary?
I mean, yeah, the 'general knowledge' or 'subject overview' book is still quite competitive, but for reference material? dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other look up tables used to be a fairly large and profitable class of books; even most 'subject overview' type technical books used to include appendixes with lookup table data in the back; I remember most of my old programming books would consist of 2/3rds to 1/2 "subject overview" stuff that would still be printed today, and the rest of the book was a listing of available library functions and their options. Anymore, the first bit, the subject overview, is still best done in book format, but the second part? the bit where I can look up library functions to see their options? that part is much better done online.
We've had cookbook/FAQ style technical books for years. If that was a superior format then the chaptered linear book format would have died out before this discussion took place.
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.
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 kind of see the original point as it relates to coding, but anecdotally StartupsOpenSourced.com has made $10k+ in revenue in the past week (not all of it is owned by me, but that's what people have paid so far)
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.
Having just now taken delivery of a new technical book - Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! - I'm guessing that rumors of their death, as Mark Twain said about his own, are greatly exaggerated. I bought it on the basis of an online review that would inform this discussion. http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2910
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.
I'm not sure it is off-topic so much as out of context. It's not just a technical post, but in large part a very technical blog and the author of the post is also the author of 'Dive into Python, Greasemonkey and HTML5', so it is also somewhat a reflection on his own work and place in the technical publishing sphere.
Physical books aren't what they used to be, as recently as the 90s. I was disappointed with Knuth volume 4A -- the glue binding makes it a pain just to hold open far enough to read comfortably, like just about any new hardback now. I'd rather have gotten a PDF. (DRM formats are still out, for me.)
This sub-thread, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2500758, to a request for a book on learning python, makes several general good points for why books are still useful and important.
Had to upvote this as it's, to my mind, a subtle but important point. Part of the 'book' experience is the typography, and someone who is blogging about the demise of the book and uses crappy typography doesn't appreciate that aspect of it.
That being said, the typographic conventions available in electronic books (that aren't simply software on a PC) allow them to invest more time in this sort of thing.
For me, an iPad like device with the 2560 x 1600 (300dpi) 10" screen would be the killer e-book device. But until then I too keep regular books around with e-books too.
I would not go that far but it definitely seems a poor choice as for me it has coloured edges, looks blurry and is a strain to read. I use a TFT screen, this font seems like it is not doing that specific feature I forgot the name of.
I will never understand why people change the font from the default on their webpages, or why that is even allowed. I set my default font because that's what I like dammit.
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.