7 ms·

It went un-noticed here, I think, but The Pragmatic Bookshelf recently fired most of its staff and are taking on no new books. In the email they sent to authors

by whenc 9mo ago

It went un-noticed here, I think, but The Pragmatic Bookshelf recently fired most of its staff and are taking on no new books. In the email they sent to authors, they quoted a 40% YoY fall in non-fiction sales, industry-wide.

vittore 9mo ago
Anecdotal evidence, all books I bought this year were used.
adamors 9mo ago
Wow, would be interested to read more about this, could you submit the email maybe as its own post? Even as a text version, I actually love the PragProg, would hate to seem them gone (but I guess it’s a foregone conclusion).
- whenc 9mo ago
  ...
  - sevenseacat 9mo ago
    I don't think this was supposed to be public knowledge.
    - whenc 9mo ago
      Out of an abundance of caution, I've deleted it. So there we are.
      - aspenmayer 9mo ago
        > Out of an abundance of caution, I've deleted it. So there we are. Out of an abundance of curiosity, I discovered an archive of your comment, which I didn’t myself make, but I link here for purposes of discussion: https://archive.is/C3gAc https://archive.is/C3gAc
- cultofmetatron 9mo ago
  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 bleeding edge stuff that would likely be out of date by the time it makes it to dead paper form.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.
  - fluorinerocket 9mo ago
    I on the other hand can't stand PDFs. They take up valuable screen space, it is annoying to scroll to the sections you need. Yeah yeah some PDFs have the side navigation thing. Most don't With a book I can put in those little flags to bookmark sections, I can easily riffle the pages and scan for the chapter I need, I can hand write in the margins I often need 2 or 3 books open to different sections, I like keeping them on my desk so I can glance at them when I need to I've probably cracked $1000 spent on books this year.
    - diab0lic 9mo ago
      I’m similar to you. I recently went as far as to buy a pdf for an out of print book and then paid to have it printed and bound. I suppose a remarkable would be another route but… they are pricey.
      - 9mo ago
tjr 9mo ago
Is this because people seek knowledge from LLMs rather than from books now? Or is it because LLMs know everything that is in books, so people don't feel compelled to learn any more themselves?
- riffic 9mo ago
  loaded questions.
  - tjr 9mo ago
    Maybe a bit depressing, but I'm not sure loaded. I was just talking to someone (in person!) a few days ago, who purported that online courses were basically dead, because people can learn from LLMs instead. And then, it seems to be a real issue amongst some people to ask, "why should I learn X, when LLMs already know it?" Not unlike, "why should I learn to divide, when we have calculators?" but on a grander scale.
    - camdenreslink 9mo ago
      My hypothesis is people will get burned out on this unguided learning via LLMs and still want some sort of curated/guided learning experience through material to understand some subject. There is the problem of "I don't know what I don't know" that a course can solve for you. An LLM can sort of do that, but you have to take its word for it, and it does it pretty much strictly worse at the moment (but is much more flexible).
      - jcynix 9mo ago
        > My hypothesis is people will get burned out on this unguided learning via LLMs [...] I'm less optimistic. Already 20+ years ago many people complained if you pointed them to books which answered their questions in depth. The standard reply was "just tell me how to solve this particular problem" instead.
        nottorp 9mo ago
anticorporate 9mo ago
Honestly, I wonder how some of these publishers stay in business at all. I haven't written a book, but I've been a technical reviewer for friends who have been published with some of the larger technical publishers. Nobody was making money from the process. I do wonder if maybe they're just taking on too many titles and reaching saturation. Do we really need "The guide to making X on Y with Z" for every potential iteration?
- falcor84 9mo ago
  > 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)".
bwahah4 9mo ago
The shelf life of technology books is shorter than it takes to read them. Most were notebooks of students quickly edited into a learning tool. Oh wow more Python recipes. Another introduction to C++! The worlds moved on from valuing the latest DSL and additions to the Linux kernel. Just a fad marketed at GenX and older Millennials. SaaS is something tech billionaires need to exist. It's not something humanity needs. Not at the scale of the 2010s ZIRP fueled mania, anyway. Employers were using subscriptions to O'Reilly as a perk. No budget for perks in the AI and economic austerity era. Maps app, communication apps, media consumption are all most of the billions of smartphone users care about.
- esafak 9mo ago
  Your map- and communication apps are SaaS.
  - NetMageSCW 9mo ago
    Not all map apps - I keep offline map apps just in case.
uxcolumbo 9mo ago
That's a shame. I got an email from them suggesting that they had a tough year. I bought 2 books even though I won't have time to read them anytime soon. Hopefully they'll find a way to keep going.
roadside_picnic 9mo ago
As an avid reader (and sometimes writer) of technical books, it's sad to see the, perhaps inevitable, decline of the space. I still remember in the early 2000s Barnes and Noble would still have massive shelf space devoted to every technical topic you could imagine. I could spend hours just exploring what languages and topics there were I didn't even know existed. Powell's Technical Books used to be an entire separate store filled with books on every technical topic imaginable. The publishing industry veterans I've worked with told me it was even more incredible during the height of the dotcom boom: book sales in the 100,000 copy range was not that rare. Today I can only think of two truly technical book stores that still exist: The MIT Press Bookstore in Cambridge, MA and Ada Books in Seattle, WA. The latter, while a delightful store, has relegated the true technical book section to the backroom, which unfortunately doesn't seem to get refreshed too often (though, part of the beauty of this is it still has many of the weird old technical books that used to be everywhere).
- ompogUe 9mo ago
  Ugh, tell me about it. In Canada, Chapters put the knife in the independents. They used to have a great selection. Once there was no competition, they reduced their selection by turning half their floor space into selling pillows and candles.
- seg_lol 9mo ago
  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.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - zdragnar 9mo ago
    My own college experience heavily soured me on both book stores and especially school run book stores. The markup was obscene and their buy back rates were worse. Half price books and a few other book stores lulled me back a few times, but nonfiction books are kept around mostly as eye candy at this point.
dehrmann 9mo ago
Sibling comments are mostly saying they either started hoarding books or switched to some combination of blog posts, Stackoverflow, and LLMs. For those with books, how are you using them?
_no_page 9mo ago
Citation needed

by whenc 9mo ago

vittore 9mo ago

Anecdotal evidence, all books I bought this year were used.

adamors 9mo ago

Wow, would be interested to read more about this, could you submit the email maybe as its own post? Even as a text version, I actually love the PragProg, would hate to seem them gone (but I guess it’s a foregone conclusion).

whenc 9mo ago
...
- sevenseacat 9mo ago
  I don't think this was supposed to be public knowledge.
  - whenc 9mo ago
    Out of an abundance of caution, I've deleted it. So there we are.
    - aspenmayer 9mo ago
      > Out of an abundance of caution, I've deleted it. So there we are. Out of an abundance of curiosity, I discovered an archive of your comment, which I didn’t myself make, but I link here for purposes of discussion: https://archive.is/C3gAc https://archive.is/C3gAc
cultofmetatron 9mo ago
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.
- fluorinerocket 9mo ago
  I on the other hand can't stand PDFs. They take up valuable screen space, it is annoying to scroll to the sections you need. Yeah yeah some PDFs have the side navigation thing. Most don't With a book I can put in those little flags to bookmark sections, I can easily riffle the pages and scan for the chapter I need, I can hand write in the margins I often need 2 or 3 books open to different sections, I like keeping them on my desk so I can glance at them when I need to I've probably cracked $1000 spent on books this year.
  - diab0lic 9mo ago
    I’m similar to you. I recently went as far as to buy a pdf for an out of print book and then paid to have it printed and bound. I suppose a remarkable would be another route but… they are pricey.
    - 9mo ago

tjr 9mo ago

Is this because people seek knowledge from LLMs rather than from books now? Or is it because LLMs know everything that is in books, so people don't feel compelled to learn any more themselves?

riffic 9mo ago
loaded questions.
- tjr 9mo ago
  Maybe a bit depressing, but I'm not sure loaded. I was just talking to someone (in person!) a few days ago, who purported that online courses were basically dead, because people can learn from LLMs instead. And then, it seems to be a real issue amongst some people to ask, "why should I learn X, when LLMs already know it?" Not unlike, "why should I learn to divide, when we have calculators?" but on a grander scale.
  - camdenreslink 9mo ago
    My hypothesis is people will get burned out on this unguided learning via LLMs and still want some sort of curated/guided learning experience through material to understand some subject. There is the problem of "I don't know what I don't know" that a course can solve for you. An LLM can sort of do that, but you have to take its word for it, and it does it pretty much strictly worse at the moment (but is much more flexible).
    - jcynix 9mo ago
      > My hypothesis is people will get burned out on this unguided learning via LLMs [...] I'm less optimistic. Already 20+ years ago many people complained if you pointed them to books which answered their questions in depth. The standard reply was "just tell me how to solve this particular problem" instead.
      - nottorp 9mo ago

anticorporate 9mo ago

Honestly, I wonder how some of these publishers stay in business at all. I haven't written a book, but I've been a technical reviewer for friends who have been published with some of the larger technical publishers. Nobody was making money from the process. I do wonder if maybe they're just taking on too many titles and reaching saturation. Do we really need "The guide to making X on Y with Z" for every potential iteration?

falcor84 9mo ago
> 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)".

bwahah4 9mo ago

The shelf life of technology books is shorter than it takes to read them. Most were notebooks of students quickly edited into a learning tool. Oh wow more Python recipes. Another introduction to C++! The worlds moved on from valuing the latest DSL and additions to the Linux kernel. Just a fad marketed at GenX and older Millennials. SaaS is something tech billionaires need to exist. It's not something humanity needs. Not at the scale of the 2010s ZIRP fueled mania, anyway. Employers were using subscriptions to O'Reilly as a perk. No budget for perks in the AI and economic austerity era. Maps app, communication apps, media consumption are all most of the billions of smartphone users care about.

esafak 9mo ago
Your map- and communication apps are SaaS.
- NetMageSCW 9mo ago
  Not all map apps - I keep offline map apps just in case.

uxcolumbo 9mo ago

That's a shame. I got an email from them suggesting that they had a tough year. I bought 2 books even though I won't have time to read them anytime soon. Hopefully they'll find a way to keep going.

roadside_picnic 9mo ago

As an avid reader (and sometimes writer) of technical books, it's sad to see the, perhaps inevitable, decline of the space. I still remember in the early 2000s Barnes and Noble would still have massive shelf space devoted to every technical topic you could imagine. I could spend hours just exploring what languages and topics there were I didn't even know existed. Powell's Technical Books used to be an entire separate store filled with books on every technical topic imaginable. The publishing industry veterans I've worked with told me it was even more incredible during the height of the dotcom boom: book sales in the 100,000 copy range was not that rare. Today I can only think of two truly technical book stores that still exist: The MIT Press Bookstore in Cambridge, MA and Ada Books in Seattle, WA. The latter, while a delightful store, has relegated the true technical book section to the backroom, which unfortunately doesn't seem to get refreshed too often (though, part of the beauty of this is it still has many of the weird old technical books that used to be everywhere).

ompogUe 9mo ago
Ugh, tell me about it. In Canada, Chapters put the knife in the independents. They used to have a great selection. Once there was no competition, they reduced their selection by turning half their floor space into selling pillows and candles.
seg_lol 9mo ago
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.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- zdragnar 9mo ago
  My own college experience heavily soured me on both book stores and especially school run book stores. The markup was obscene and their buy back rates were worse. Half price books and a few other book stores lulled me back a few times, but nonfiction books are kept around mostly as eye candy at this point.

dehrmann 9mo ago

Sibling comments are mostly saying they either started hoarding books or switched to some combination of blog posts, Stackoverflow, and LLMs. For those with books, how are you using them?

_no_page 9mo ago

Citation needed