Same with the Stanford university bookstore. Was one of the better bookstores in the Bayarea. Used to have a whole room of technical, science, math books. It too is a shadow of its former self. So sad.

> As an avid reader (and sometimes writer) of technical books, it's sad to see the, perhaps inevitable, decline of the space.

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.

> told me it was even more incredible during the height of the dotcom boom

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.

I too am avid reader and was visiting five local bookstores on a weekly basis. Several of them had huge areas stocked with tech books. I had tried Amazon maybe six months after it launched and bought there sporadically. But almost any book i sought was available locally and the savings weren't worth the convenience of purchasing locally.

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.

The UW bookstore in Seattle like many big science schools had a wondrous technical book section. Isles of Springer. The bookstore itself is a shadow of its former shelf.

Ada's these days is more about politics than technology.

Weird, I have honestly never walked into a Barnes and Noble and had satisfaction with any of their technical content on the shelf. That pleasure died when we lost Borders.

*Edit: spell correct kills me!

This makes sense, "enough" of the old technical info is in the AI brains now and easily accessed via a query.

I love pragprog but I think nonfiction books in dead tree form is going away. YEs, I know there are people who will pay for a physical book, just not enough to make for a profitable business.

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.

...

Definitely isn't the latter. Numerical Recipes and Hacker's Delight have tons of gems that you won't get from an LLM, or that an LLM will even understand despite appearing all their training sets.

even before LLMs you could/can get a lot of info on the web. Most ideas presented in books exist on the internet somewhere, quite a few pass through HN. In the 90s and early 2ks I used to hoard books, but now, not so much, I get a few through my library these days but a lot of times I just find the book is padded out to be a book and the meaty bit of the book is usually tiny.

Another option might be that people are increasingly using LLMs to write the books.

loaded questions.

> Nobody was making money from the process.

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)".

Your map- and communication apps are SaaS.