alt Hacker NewsThis is quite weird that "AI" presumably ruined book sales, since the info from the books were mostly available though the search.
You want it structured? You need the book - "AI" won't solve it for you (well, if we discount cases of word for word reproduction... which we probably shouldn't, but this does not seem to be the argument here).
The kind of people, that read the books, are the kind of people that largely won't settle for a chatbot as a replacement.
Can there be another reason for the sales drop? Unemployment, "death of the junior", wages decline?
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Economic headwinds and the collapse of tech labor would definitely impact people's willingness to learn tech, especially on their own time with books/courses. I'm not sure if it's enough alone to cause yearly 50+% declines, though.
AI for sure impacts ad revenue. It's an absolute mess trying to measure proper web traffic anymore, and it' been shown quite a few times how AI summaries in search impact page clicks.
It depends on whether you bought books to learn or bought books to solve.
There are a vast number of books that I purchased not for any interest in the topic, but to solve a particular problem. I have zero interest in understanding Docker. I find it tedious. But I do have a book on it as I did need to know it at some point.
I wouldn’t buy that book today, as AI means I no longer need to know Docker.
> The income from my book sales went from being enough for me to live off (2024) to zero (2026).
> The traffic to my blog and my books (which were free to read online) increased beyond what I can currently afford. Virtually all of it comes from AI crawlers, so there is no ad income.
I know correlation is not causation, post hoc ergo propter hoc etc. etc. But these circumstantial evidence are too strong to simply ignore... As it stands AI is the obvious culprit. And with the current evidence, it is perfectly reasonable to blame AI and nothing but AI.
Slightly disagee.
Personally, I read way less traditional books when it comes to learning stuff. Especially the “utility”/“tutorial”/“handbook”. Top nitch books talking about general principles I’d still read.
Especially for books that need to teach me a subset of a certain discipline - in the past I’d get 4-5 (or at least samples), and try to find the parts that are of interest to me in a style that fits me. Novadays I’d just ask Claude to explain things in a form that I like, with pretty illustrations from Imgen :)
E.g. I don’t think I’ll read the animal books from O’reilly again. But an equivalend of “Thinking in C++” or “Pearls of programming” of a new field? Sure.