

The "book" is dead - brianwillis
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2011/04/29/the-book-is-dead

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acangiano
> 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.

~~~
billybob
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.

~~~
quanticle
_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.

Try doing that with a Kindle :)

~~~
capnrefsmmat
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.

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antiterra
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.

(edit: repetition)

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iuguy
I think the title was poorly chosen.

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.

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jmtame
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.

------
kmfrk
Good post.

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.

~~~
rimantas
I do recommend some books: <http://www.cssmastery.com/>
<http://handcraftedcss.com/>
<http://simplebits.com/notebook/2009/06/09/wssse/>

~~~
kmfrk
Those are the exact same(!) books I would recommend. The only different thing
I would write is an added "... if any".

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warmfuzzykitten
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.

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BasDirks
Warning: slightly off-topic.

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.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
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.

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billswift
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.

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lhnz
Google's search enables the consumer. Obviously the consumer seeks the lowest
possible price, and legality has nothing to do with this.

------
thret
Worst. Font. Ever.

~~~
aw3c2
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.

~~~
warp
subpixel rendering perhaps? (Microsoft calls it ClearType).

The font looks terrible on my linux machine, it looks fine on the macbook.

~~~
technomancy
Looks great on Ubuntu here, possibly because of the higher-than-average DPI?

