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Comment by zeveb | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

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