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Comment by bphogan | Hacker News Reader

I love that there are many people on here clamoring for physical copies. But over the years, I've noticed (for the books I have written and edited), print copies sharply declined and ebook copies sharply went up. It's to the point where I don't even know why we bother doing paper anymore.

I prefer digital because I can send out updated copies of the books to readers for free, which I can't do on paper. And programming stuff changes so frequently.

So I guess I'm saying if you want print books, you should make that known by buying physical copies of books. Cos if the trends I see continues, I can't imagine it'll be practical to do print tech books too far into the future.

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FWIW, I too much prefer printed technical books, and buy them when I have a choice. The problem is that paper books are more-easily-searchable (!), and more-easily-readable.

I made the mistake of buying a few technical ebooks, but never will again.

My only concern is that publishers seem to be shifting to cheaper and cheaper bindings and glue, which may negatively impact the lifespan of my books.

As a counterpoint, I'm exactly the opposite.

In general I won't buy a book unless it's available as an ebook. Over time I've found all of the features of paper books that I like are just no comparison to the convenience and usefulness of ebooks.

That said, I do occasionally buy used paper books, or an old book that doesn't have an ebook.

You can have your ebooks printed.

> You can have your ebooks printed.

Not (normally) legally though. I'd be glad if they would include a notice at the beginning allowing me to do that.

O'Reilly does include that notice. But that doesn't really matter; you can pretty much always have your ebooks printed legally. The obstacle is getting the printer to do it regardless of whether it's legal; they don't know what the law is and generally don't care.

When it comes to technical books, the cheaper bindings and glue don't matter... are you really gonna need that Angular 1.x book that far into the future? :)

The majority of my technical library is language-agnostic and written decades ago: The Pragmatic Programmer, Clean Code, Code Complete, for instance.

Not to mention SICP, K&R, The Little Books, and EPL

> I love that there are many people on here clamoring for physical copies.

It's hilarious that people in tech clamor for physical books, even at the cost of trees, environment, poor accessibility, poor maintainability, poor upgradability and poor portability. I suspect it is because of the sucky "format-hell" of ebooks and sub-par reading experience. And the fact that ebooks are still not a first class citizen of the web I agree that these trends will continue. And that's exactly what publishers would want. To be able to make more money!

There are a couple of studies out there that show that reading from a physical book (as opposed to an e-book) actually leads to learning the material better. So, when it comes to books like these, I wouldn't be surprised if people wanted physical copies.

Seems like we are trained to scan tablets and monitors differently[0] but that eink is similar to paper[1][2].

Personally I find the tactile experience of reading a hard-copy helps me focus and generally enjoy the physical experience of interacting with a book. And who ever said that people in tech were concerned about the environment?[3]

[0]http://er.educause.edu/articles/2015/9/paper-or-tablet-readi...

[1]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3873942/

[2]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251509359_Comparing...

[3]http://i.imgur.com/Ad6WrGj.jpg

You mean like this: https://bubbl.in/book/pride-and-prejudice-by-jane-austen/1

Full disclosure: I'm the developer.

> I suspect it is because of the sucky "format-hell" of ebooks and sub-par reading experience.

I don't understand, why do you find it "hilarious" then? You're answering your own question! I'd call those major issues with ebooks.

For the record, I own LYAH from NoStarch (I actually bought the PDF+printed copy a few years ago, but sadly the printed copy was lost in transit and never arrived, and I didn't do anything about it), and I've never used the ebook version. I tried, but it was horribly uncomfortable. It's funny, but the website is actually the preferred format, and way better than the ebook.

> It's funny, but the website is actually the preferred format, and way better than the ebook.

I agree but I'd correct that to 'web is the preferred medium' instead of 'website is a preferred format'.

Websites aren't a book reading experience. I mean they can hold the content of a book but even as we gain on accessibility with a website the reading direction, proper pagination and memorize-ability is lost.

It doesn't feel like a book anymore.

> > I love that there are many people on here clamoring for physical copies.

> even at the cost of trees, environment,

We grow trees to make paper. That's how the paper industry works. Nobody complains about us devastating "virgin potato fields" because we use potatoes to make chips. But the logic is precisely the same. There are more trees _today_ than in the 1950s because of the paper industry (as well as tree planting efforts). So if we stopped using paper cold-turkey, we would remove the financial incentive for companies to plant more trees.

> I suspect it is because of the sucky "format-hell" of ebooks and sub-par reading experience.

For me the real issue is the licensing. I think that it is intolerable that a company can claim that you don't own ebooks. It's a slap in the face to traditional freedoms of readers and is incredibly chilling. Amazon deleting copies of 1984 and other books from every kindle on the planet paints a precedent that should be taken very seriously. Not to mention that their product line is literally named after fire-related terms (perhaps subconsciously implying the purpose of the products is virtual book burning)! You couldn't make this stuff up.

Companies that sell PDFs which are licensed under free licenses are much better, but the other issues you mentioned still mean I probably won't buy ebooks for a while. I prefer physical pages.

> For me the real issue is the licensing.

Sure. Wanting to own physical books to avoid issues of broken licensing model or issues of service centralization isn't the same thing as wanting physical books because dead-tree ones supposedly feel better than their electronic counterparts.

The latter is simply untrue, only a means to hijack industry standards, sell propaganda, and profit from it.

IMHO, electronic books can easily have a great reading experience (much, much better) if only books/manuscripts related software was let in the open for people to innovate upon. Or made a part of the web, a first class citizen, with decentralization, accessibility etc.

I pretty much agree with you that existing options have a lot of deliberate problems but do not think that the solution to all of those is in physical books. I'd rather push for books and web being coalesced into a single unified resource that is both accessible and open.

My friend & I even started a community/foundation that we plan to build on some of these ideas:

https://bubbl.in/about

> Amazon deleting copies of 1984 and other books from every kindle on the planet paints a precedent that should be taken very seriously.

I hadn't heard about this before! And what's even worse is that Amazon was allowed to acquire the .book TLD and with that own a very very large piece of "public property" for peanuts. I guess there was very little reportage by media on this. But then such is life lately.

> There are more trees _today_ than in the 1950s because of the paper industry…

That's an interesting thread to go after. My tryst with physical books was almost a decade ago, and the industry I knew locally then was quite different from what you describe here. If the world gives up on ebooks like the talk of the town is lately, I'm pretty sure there will be an "impact" that would no longer hide under the design of industry.

> because dead-tree ones supposedly feel better than their electronic counterparts.

I'll be honest, I prefer physical books. The smell, the feel of turning real pages, the fact that I can write all over them, the fact you don't need to charge them. These are things that you can't emulate with an ebook. Are they subjective? Yes. Are there things that are easier with ebooks? Hell yes.

However, I feel that I learn things better when I read from a book than when I read from a screen. I'm not sure why (and I've heard there's been studies on this) but maybe it's got to do with how I grew up learning -- lots of book reading in weird positions on my couch (I like lying upside down with my head on the floor if I'm really into a book).

ISTR studies that retention is much better from printed books than ebooks; certainly, lots of people prefer the UX independent of objective utility.

If we had better large format readers, that might change somewhat (at least, the subjective UX preference bits); I'm happy enough with ebooks for the most part, but then my freakishly large tablet (Galaxy Note 12.2) is about the minimum tolerable size reader, for me, for many tech books.

> ISTR studies that retention is much better from printed books than ebooks.

Yes, that is correct. It is true that retention is better with a "rigidly & finely laid out" book. Physical books have a rigid layout so they have that advantage. Some ebook formats too have that quality and those ebooks have a better retention.

Retention/memorization depends on visual signatures of a piece. I mean, apart from the context it is the arrangement of paragraphs, subtle use of diagrams and figures and a well designed layout, and other hints that add up into the pictographic memory that people form while reading books. Also the linear reading direction and sometimes even the page number helps people recall a concept later in life.

Actually, AFAIK, rigid layout on emissive scenes doesn't solve the problem, whereas flexible layout on reflective (i.e., eInk) screens at least narrows the retention gap between digital and hardcopy.

Really? I thought layout of a book (software) has nothing to do nature of screen (emissive or reflective). By a flexible layout I hope you meant the need to reflow the text, because it is the text that is usually hard to scale across a spectrum of devices/orientations.

While I do understand that the nature of screen has an "impact" on the book reading experience (or any software experience), and thus on its device sales, but I'm not sure how the screentype would affect someone's memorizability of an ebooks independent of the layout in use: flexible or rigid. That sounds a bit far fetched.

Kindly quote the source of that claim/original research.

>So I guess I'm saying if you want print books, you should make that known by buying physical copies of books. Cos if the trends I see continues, I can't imagine it'll be practical to do print tech books too far into the future.

Agree with your sentiment but I don't think economics will be the cause of fewer books being printed. The technology for printing has advanced to the point that Amazon and other Print-on-Demand companies are able to fulfill their standard delivery promises for online orders without even carrying inventory.

I'll bet five American dollars it will.

The future will most likely be fewer books printed because publishers will just stop doing it and offer print-on-demand, passing the price to the customer.

My tmux book was originally done like that - printed only on demand. And the price difference reflected it.

I do buy physical copies of technical books (5 in the last month alone).

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