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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1118660757/

Ok, this really irks me. Why do people keep writing and printing paper books that will become obsolete before even the first batch is sold out? Topics like this, or the latest (at the time of writing) version of jQuery or other things that have lifespan of few months? Surely this is just a waste of money and paper for everyone. I can see the value of e-books, or even print-on-demand publications, but not this. Those books end up either cluttering the local libraries or pissing off second-hand bookshop employees because no-one will buy or read them in a year. It's almost a printer-to-recycler pipeline.

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There are lots of reasons. The fact that you don't have a use for this does not mean that other people don't too.

I buy text books, not as often as I did because of things like Lynda but I do from time to time. The first thing I do is to cut the book with an automatic saw and give the pages to my amazing Fujitsu automatic scanner.

Then I store the book on a box far away in a storage room.

This way I have a 100% DRM free book I can read whenever I want and weights 0 grams, and I can travel to other countries with it. Most of the time(when buying multiple books) the tree killer version is cheaper than the DRM ebook one, and it does not have your name in all the pages like some bastards do.

Some books never will have a DRM free ebook ever.

Stripping the DRM for most drm (adobe or amazon) is way easier than you seem to think. Digitizing a print copy...

- usually costs more to buy

- takes much more time to dissect and scan the book than it takes to crack drm

- PDFs (from scan) have lower visual quality, and are bigger (PDFs have a place... it's difficult to convert something like an organic chem textbook with all the margin diagrams and complex layout into a nice epub, for instance, but even then good PDFs are generated by the publisher, not scanned)

- OCR errors, so text search may not always work even if you can read the original text (you kept is as a pdf, kept it as an image with OCR text as a separate layer only used for searching, or used cleartype-like tech which is similar but basically compresses similar looking glyphs)

- converting to a real ebook (epub) for reading on smaller devices, without extensive proofing (and reformatting if the book uses layout, as in it isn't a traditional fiction/nonfiction work that's all uniform prose), has mediocre-to-horrible results. Line wrapping, layout and OCR errors abound.

Out of curiosity, what kind of scanner do you have?

I've been wanting to scan all my important mail and documents for a while, but I need the process to be as frictionless as possible for me to actually go through with it and I'm unsure what kind of scanner to buy for that.

Why not just buy a digital version and remove the DRM? It's easy enough and almost always cheaper.

Not all books have a digital, DRM free version? Also, sometimes having the physical book is nice, especially for quick reference between a few known pages

Because that gives money to encourage more DRM.

although it does not make sense, I believe it is illegal to remove DRM...

That's under the DMCA's no circumvention clause (in the US at least). It may not be illegal in other jurisdictions.

Interesting that the DMCA essentially slapped fair use squarely across the face.

Would you rather have a treekiller or a mountain top destroyer (ebook)? I mean we can all play this game. I prefer reading paper myself.

The problem is that the alternative is reading on your computer or reader - which sucks (for many) compared with a real book. For me I remember things more clearly when I read them in physical books because the information exists in a "space" - I remember reading something, pick up the book and flip there. I can recall things by remembering what was around them in the book. The tactile-ness works for my brain.

I totally agree they aren't worth destroying trees for (I only buy paper books for topics that are more age-resistant) but I get why people still buy them.

You put into words something I've experienced throughout my life--a sort of "spatial topical memory"--and it's refreshing to see others often do the same.

I like digital reference material for the advantages they possess (ease of searching, bookmarking, etc.) but dislike them for the same reasons you illustrate and others, such as thumbing through. It's strange how tactile feedback can become so important. It's also one of the reasons I wish publishers would do something like what Pragmatic Press does more often: Offer both the physical and digital versions of books (although if you're buying both, I'd rather the digital copy be a bit less expensive).

Since there are advantages to both, I'm reluctant to say one format is better than the other, but each is good at something the other isn't. Whenever I've read reference materials in a digital format, I find I suffer from a similar problem to yours: Recalling things in proximity becomes jumbled with other reference materials and works. There's definitely something to be said for a physical medium even if it's not near-instantly searchable and required physical bookmarks.

Then again, I can't plug headphones into a dead tree and read it in complete darkness. (Setting it on fire doesn't count.)

It's not paper books that become obsolete, but paper tech books. Although I love paper books and will never stop preferring them, they're less good for timely technical material like 'how to' books, which do go out of date.

That said, not everyone has a Kindle or a tablet, and if you're trying to do something difficult on the computer (true by definition, if you're using a 'x for dummies' book), then you don't want the tutorial material on the same screen as the software you're trying to wrap your head around. Also, I don't think they'll be obsolete in a year, more like 5+. Indeed, I've found that buying cheap books on complex software that go a few editions back is often an equally good way to get a grip on the fundamental skills even if the interface has changed in the meantime - you can easily figure out the newer features later, whereas learning the shiny new stuff first can often delay getting a good grasp on the fundamental skills.

> It's not paper books that become obsolete, but paper tech books.

Yes, exactly. Maybe I haven't articulated my point in a clear enough way, but I meant only paper tech books, and not all of them, but the ones about topics that change fast enough to make the book obsolete soon after being printed.

I have a paper copy of SICP, which is a quite old book, and yet it's probably not going to lose its value for next few decades. But books about, say, current most hip MVC JS framework get obsolete within a year from the date of publication. I'm hoping that the industry will move to print-on-demand tech books because as you said, there's a great value to having your documentation / tutorials somewhere else than on the screen (heck, I often print out RFCs when I need them for work), but dumping short-lived books on bookstores around the world just feels like a huge waste.

I just recently bought an O'Reilly book -- XMPP, the Definitive Guide.

I double-dog-dare you to find an online resource that covers XMPP as well as the book.

When online guides stop sucking, I'll stop buying books.

Hey I'm in that book :)

You are only looking at this kind of book as a sort of reference manual, but there is also historical value there as well. There don't seem to be many web projects that put enough effort in to describe the current state of an industry, but an author will. And that has a lot of value.

Books are a slice in time, whereas websites and news articles tend to show an evolving state of an industry.

I'm with you on the general principle that printing paper books about fast-moving subjects looks like a futile endeavor, but - does 3D printing still move that fast?

The consumer-accessible (not industrial) 3D printing is, like, 3 years old field; a lot of things changed in hardware and software during that time and I'd expect many more to change in the following years.

Because people keep buying them. No idea why.

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