alt Hacker NewsIt 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.
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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.
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).
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?
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?
Anecdotal evidence, all books I bought this year were used.
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.
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).