If a host pulls the plug, the general feeling is “oh shit, did someone back all of this up?”. If an author dies, the book is still there. hen there’s the whole right-to-read stuff, and if books become like that, then the paper version is superior. Plus, it’s available second-hand.
It’s too bad that the Wiki books section isn’t that expansive yet. I’m a big fan of Thinking In Java - the HTML version is superior, and I agree fully with “you can’t grep dead trees”.
When providing a book in electronic form that everyone’s going to read anyway, don’t lock it up in a database on a site or in some proprietary PDF with “usage rights”. Throw it out there as zip file of HTML files, as torrent, spread out over several filehosts, make it absolutely ubiquitous and easy to locate. It’s not the space that’s a problem.
Having authored and coauthored seven books, the first one published in 2000, I know firsthand of the decrease in sales figures technical trade books have experienced over the past several years. And, yes, the economics of writing a computer trade book are dismal when compared to writing for a magazine or working a 9-5 job, as I previously blogged about: http://scottonwriting.net/sowblog/posts/146.aspx
There will always be people who buy technical books, though, because there are certain properties of the medium that are more advantageous in certain situations than online resources. It’s like radio - 50 years ago, everyone listened to the radio and used it as their main source of information and entertainment. Today, with TV and the Internet, that’s hardly the case, but it’s also clear that there still is a place for radio and it still draws in significant audiences.
I think the area that has been hardest hit and will see the greatest decline is technical books geared toward intermediate to advanced developers. Most skilled developers will turn to online sources for obvious reasons. Technical books will do best in the beginner market. It’s a lot easier to say to a person who has .NET experience, “Oh, just go to Google to find out how to do X,” but for someone who’s totally new to .NET (or perhaps even totally new to programming), the web’s resources are far too disjointed to provide a sound learning environment. For them, a well-written book is a better option and will provide a more structured learning environment.
As I’ve seen book sales decline, I’ve decided never to write a book geared toward intermediate or advanced developers. I plan on continuing to write for one audience: the beginner who’s learning ASP.NET from scratch.
The online model, where there is no pretension of screening for quality, is ultimately a better system. There’s a (nearly) infinite amount of content to choose from, and we have an ace in the hole that doesn’t exist for dead-tree books – Google automatically sorts the best stuff to the top for us through the miracle of PageRank/TrustRank.
Holy shit. You’re kidding, right? I’ve given up on Google for relevant search results.
You are absolutely incorrect about “the best stuff” being sorted to the top. It’s the most popular stuff that’s at the top. Popular != best, or even correct.
I’ll give you an example: Using a custom Page Viewstate provider. Pretty well every page provided by Google gives absolutely wrong advice.
Yes, I did read the two comments on Sahil’s post I linked to. I don’t see how this “proves” online wins.
What I’m saying (and I believe was summarized by Sahil and Bill Vaughn), is that blog posts and other “incomplete” information garnered online often times can give you those small chunks of advanced information not found in books necessarily.
I still contend, and it seems echoed in comments on this post, is that many many people still use books to get off the ground and get their head around a technology initially. Then they fill in the gaps with online resources, be it blogs, whitepapers etc…
Sure, 99.99% of the web is crap compared to 90% of books… The odds
of picking up a mediocre book off the shelf are much greater than
the odds of getting a mediocre link in the top 3 search results.
That’s another big lie from the same industry that gave us Harry Potter–99.99% of books are crap too. But who buys books that way, just picking one up off the shelf? At the very least read a review on Amazon first.
I got the book the other day and I’ve found quite a few nice tricks in there that have been immediately applied to current projects. My one question has come on compressing viewstate; I used the exact code from the book and found that my viewstate actually grew slightly. Am I missing something here? I assume it’s probably a theoretical issue (i.e. it only helps at size xxxx of viewstate and up) but this seems like a good place to ask
Sorry, just wanted to clarify something…when I used the GZip compression on the viewstate, the hidden __VSTATE field is about 446 bytes long, whereas uncompressed the __VIEWSTATE field is 330 bytes. It’s just a simple form with one or two controls on it.
This is one of the posts which has a lot of points I have to disagree with because choosing a technical book to read is very much like choosing a book in any other field. If I do not like author’s presentation style, language (totally helpy English without any zing) and simplistic examples, I am not going to buy the book. A book that really stands out in recent years is “Domain-driven design” - it is so well-written that it can actually be read with gusto. O’Reilly’s books are generally very good and to the point but also disposable. On the opposite side we have “fire starters” from Wrox (I am sorry guys but content in those books seems copied from some help file. Helpy English reveals it).
Publishing one’s work has more to do with recognition in the community (or with the client audience if you are a consultant) than with making money. Actually, money making becomes a side-effect once you sell your consulting services. Let’s face it: no book can solve any technical challenge by itself.
Blogs and electronic publishing without peer review results in as much crap online as in print. In fact, online world is no different than printed world; only 2-5% of content is really good e.g. it contains original insight or at least one original idea.
Just got your book off Amazon and so far I think it’s great. I have read other ASP.net books, but I love the way you guys give explinations and examples that aren’t over your head for a beginner and aren’t dumbed down for those that do have some experience.
As a co-author of a technical book I really have to question all your numbers in this post. Here’s some stats from my experience.
Most technical books don’t have a second printing - so you’re going to have a print run of 5 to 7 thousand.
On a technical book figure you will see 5-7% of the cover price. Our book sold for $50, so that’s about $2.50 - $3.50 per book sold.
Publishers know this going in - they’re not going to publish a book that won’t at least cover costs. I’d really like to see some evidence on the “1% of books support 99%”
In retrospect, I think it’s unfortunate that the book’s title says “ASP.NET 2.0” instead of just ASP.NET. Some of the best tips have worked since ASP.NET 1.0, and there’s much that will be postdated by ASP.NET 3.5 - sure, there’s the listview and LINQ for data access, but most of the core info is unchanged.
Version aside, I think it is worthwhile to buy books about a specific technology. All of my greatest technical leaps have come from reading really good books - Fritz Onion’s ASP.NET book, several CSS / web design books, and a few key SQL books, for instance. Blogs are good for keeping up or finding specific information, but they rarely do a good job at going deep AND wide at a consistent quality level to really teach something.
I’ve started buying books again lately, and have been really happy about it. Last night I wanted to check up on how I’m using Javascript and AJAX in my current project, and it was nice to re-read K. Scott Allen’s chapter on that after a day of random advice on from the far corners of the universe.
I’ve used to do the same as Jeff and others here - buy lots of technical books and then not even read some. Safari really saved me from myself. Having such a huge libary availiable online and searchable is great and has completly replaced by specific tech book buying. I still sometimes buy and enjoy timeless concept books but I’m more picky. This is an area the web often doesn’t cover. Sometimes you just can’t beat a really good book.
I still think specific tech books have some worth but for me only when presented through something like Safari, not as dead trees on my shelf. As a FOSS developer they often provide the missing manual that you wish came in the box, only there was no box, just a download and a very messy wiki.
Jeff, your comments about publishers ignoring technical book quality is misdirected.
The problem is neither with technical book publishers nor even with books, it is an endemic problem in computer science. This problem extends beyond books into peer-reviewed journal papers on computer science research, which are typically of appallingly poor quality compared to scientific research papers.
If you look at technical books on other subjects, such as computational physics, you find that publishers are far more pedantic about quality. Also, books on these subjects are typically several times as expensive as the cheapest computer books.
As the author and publisher of books on the intersection between computers and science, I can tell you that our technical book market is thriving and suffers to a much lesser degree from from these quality issues or from theft (be it plagiarism or bittorrent).
Well, it is 2010, and I just bought 8 technical books tied to largely version-specific technology. I don’t consider myself old-fashioned, since I mostly use online resources; but for thought and contemplation, paper still works by taking me away from the computer, other obligations, and perhaps, a backlit screen. I’m interested to see how much these are addressed by non-backlit eBook readers, vs. iPad 3G, which has all the disadvantages of a computer except for portability.
The link to “less than 1% of books are actually successful” resolves to a python mailing list posting about RDF that does not seem to be apropos to the #4 paragraph above, which starts with:
"Bruce Eckel says less than 1% of books are actually successful. At best, 99% of books will have a brief peak of sales-- hopefully enough to earn back your advance-- and then crash directly into irrelevance and permanent out-of-print obscurity. "
