People still use programming books, they just don't purchase new retail books as often. Books have become magnitudes cheaper for publishers to produce but the books didn't get cheaper for consumers. I went to O'Reilly's site, clicked on the first book that popped up and it costs $67.99 for a digitally printed paperback book:

https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/345913182/ai-engineering/c...

Take a guess why so many younger devs will opt to pirate a PDF rather than purchase retail programming books. Publishers are pricing themselves out of the market.