I no longer buy physical books, tech or otherwise, as in 2010 I switched completely to ebooks.
Actually, I recently bought a couple of decades-old tech books of retrocomputing value. I found digital copies I regularly reference, but those books are so valuable I want backups.
Personally, no. I've completely switched to ebooks.
That being said, I'm the author of an ebook about Rust and Security (Black Hat Rust[0]) that sold thousands of copies, and I've been asked a few times for a physical edition: some prefer to have the hardcopy version on the desk when studying and programming.
Yes I buy sometimes. Reason? In Canada sometimes an ebook is priced the same or nearly the same as a paper version AND you get ebook version coupon anyway.
This. My 10" e reader, boox note 2, is a godsend. It runs a barebones android which gives you almost zero distractions.
Annotations are great with the touch sensitive pen.
My reading increased 5-10x, b/c the friction to get that heavy book is gone. Also no more waking up the misses with a bed light, as the backlight is pretty subtle.
Sorry for the sales pitch, but these devices are just awesome.
I do it partly so I can dog-ear pages, write on them, and highlight them, but mostly because quite a few publishers still just absolutely suck at formatting code samples in e-books. as an industry, they're 20 years into it and they haven't figured it out, which is just pitiful, and paying attention to that on a publisher-by-publisher basis would be an absurd waste of memory.
if I buy an ebook, it's almost guaranteed to be one the author published themselves.
edit: the other reason I do it is I have very good memory when it comes to where in a book I saw something. I can often just pick up the book and open it to the exact page, even years afterwards. I recently did that with one of Elena Feranti's Neapolitan novels, and they're often over 1000 pages. I haven't seen anything equivalent with ebooks, so for me, in that particular respect, they're inferior.
Only ebooks. But books themselves, the good ones, are a really useful resource that I still haven't been able to replace despite the availability of many other free resources like blogs and video tutorials.
I’ll generally download a local copy of the language spec and the standard library docs. Rust’s borrow checker aside, most mainline programming languages have enough in common it’s usually all I need. Google’s there when I need more.
Mostly reading a lot of blog posts and whichever e-material was available. Also read a lot of code.
So on the scale for the original question, ebook over regular books. I used to use physical books in the past, but with the broad availability of material on the web, my need for them dropped dramatically.
For tech books I prefer the PDF version on a tablet. Search, and clickable links. Taught myself SQL, regex, sed and awk, and a few others that way. Recently found out I learn a lot watching demos on YouTube which I dismissed before. I do like a physical book for deep studying though.
I generally prefer physical Books but for tech, I prefer online version (ideally HTML or PDF). The reason is that it is easier to follow along especially if I am writing code and even copy/paste snippets if the book has those. Best tech books for me are those that are dead simple HTML/CSS with no JS so that I can just run it directly in browser without a server.
I've switched completely to ebook, but there are downsides.
First is that the ebook annotation is clunkier than physical annotation, for various reasons (zooming, palm detection etc.).
In addition to finding the right pdf annotator, one needs to find the right tablet (I choose a tablet because I like colors and smooth movement); the vast majority of the tablets are geared towards video consumption, and they have the 16:9 form factor (which is terrible for ebooks reading).
The second is that once one find the most convenient pdf annotator, they will need to get into the ridicolous practice of buying ebooks, but then actually annotate pirated copies (otherwise, with DRM, one is bound to the producer's reader).
Nonetheless, I personally find digital reading overall preferrable over the physical counterpart. The experience of reading Cracking the coding interview, after many years of ebooks, was odd and not so comfortable.
I still like physical books for the fact that I learned to study by doing a lot of highlighting and note taking. It's just a bit more of a pain in the ass to do all of that when you've just got a PDF.
You get what you pay for in a good book by a good author from a reputed publisher most of the time.
They're SO HEAVY, though, and since I live on the road my books are my heaviest possessions. I always end up giving them away when I'm done with them full of highlighted stuff which people actually seem to appreciate.
This is the last one I powered through which I recommend anyone writing go get a copy of:
It depends entirely on the type of information. If it’s something like Pragmatic Programmer I prefer physical copy. If it’s a reference book like how to do x in language y pdf makes it faster to locate information.
I read fiction as ebooks (basically exclusively since days of palm pilot and Treo, then kindle and phone and tablets), but far prefer physical books when learning a new topic including tech. Few reasons but I think it's at least partially because:
1. It's easier to mark or hold with my finger e.g. A table or reference or definition page, then return or glance at it as I progress next few pages of that topic. I find it hard to go back and forth in ebook,triply so on e-ink with slow refresh.
2. I cannot explain this but with ebook I don't get a sense of progression or framework relationship. I think with physical book my brain "maps" knowledge to something that's at beginning middle or end of book. And or it's keenly aware that this topot took two pagds thjs topic took 7 pages. Layout of tables and content and lists is firmer. Not sure how to explain it but I find that physical progression through the book solidifies it in my brain.
(I don't do much note taking or highlighting but I suppose it's good to have as an easy physical option. While I type all my work notes and my todos are electronic, I don't do really do electronic book annotation for whatever reason.)
Overall, it's at the point where existence of really good physical book may influence whether I dig into an optional technical / learning topic or not.
While I feel the same way towards point 2, I actually find it easier to follow along on a monitor. Sure, it requires a big monitor to display both the doc and the ide/editor, and possibly even the output (say the browser if it's a web framework).
Right, but that's cheating :-). I like everything better on my large monitors.
But they have zero portability, so to me they were not part of this comparison. If I am learning about a net new topic that I want to really dive into and engross myself and dedicate and get into the zone, I like to sit down on a comfy chair, lie down on the couch, or bench in a park, or best of all bring the book to shady lounge chair in Cuba lol! Kindle, tablet and physical book can do those things, my monitor setup less so :-)
I agree completely. I'd like to expand on your #1. I think that physical books make it much easier to have multiple books all open on your desk as you look between all of them, and also to have bookmarks within a single book that you flip between.
As you say, I love ebooks for fiction. But the folks building these apps and devices still haven't hit on an interaction model that works well for non-fiction.
This is the reason I love ebooks on a proper workstation with a huge monitor. I can fit eight or more books open at once... but more likely 3 or 4 plus a web-browser and notes.
I might have three copies of the same book open at once. One for linear reading, one for search and one for cross referencing. Much better than a physical book. A bookmarks side-bar works well in e-readers if there are specific locations you regularly need access to.
Tablets and physical e-readers suck in comparison to a proper computer. You also might need to strip DRM to get out of some walled-garden reader that prevents you opening multiple instances of the same book. Copy paste is a killer feature for note taking (and another reason to ditch ecosystem readers that interfere with copy paste like Apple books).
I use the Calibre e-reader with custom style overrides to get my preferred spacing, margins etc. It's ugly out of the box but doesn't require much tweaking to look like Apple Books if you know css. Works great on MacOs/Linux/Windows (I use them all). If a book has hardcoded fonts/styles/spacing I don't like then I use the Calibre editor to remove them.
I don't use Calibre as a library tool, I find that pretty annoying. I just use a git repo with folders for genres and markdown file with each book for notes.
I use a window a bit bigger than a typical fiction paperback and a bit wider aspect ratio. I like a good bit of whitespace in the margin to help me concentrate. I don't want the text to feel crampt or my reading scanline to enter another window. After making the changes I zoom in (ctrl-mousewheel) until the text is roughly 20pt on a 34" screen (depends on the screen). The viewer might need to be restarted to sort out the layout changes.
This is what I have in my notes for the settings. Just a result of iterative poking until I like it so the css is uh... not fit for a code review :)
# Font
Baskerville (google fonts) I think I might use Merriweather on some OS because they render differently, I can't recall offhand).
In Star Trek they're always carrying around their PADDs while working, and when they've been shown to be really busy they'd have a bunch of PADDs laid out on the desk in front of them. You obviously need a bunch of Kindles.
I am a voracious physical note taker when learning, personally. There's something about the physicality of it that helps it stay in my brain. I rarely have to read my notes, once I've written them. That's part if the reason I enjoy hard copies so much, I find scribbling in the margins can have much the same effect, if not as well. Just a small summation of the paragraph in scribble form, to cut through the jargon, of possible and underlining the actionable phraseology keeps it locked in =[
I agree with everything you said except that for me it also applies to fiction.
I read a lot of fiction on my Kindle, and it's never as satisfying as leafing through a paper novel. I don't read start to finish, I tend to go back to favorite passages, or to re-read a character's introduction some chapters before (and if I get lost, some other passage is sure to catch my eye!) and ebooks make this painful.
My way of reading is very "physical", for lack of a better word. Ebooks are not good for this at all.
I still like my Kindle, because nothing beats having hundreds of novels on a single lightweight device. But to me that's its biggest and almost only advantage. (Secondary: adjusting font size as my eyesight grows less precise with age).
> 2. I cannot explain this but with ebook I don't get a sense of progression or framework relationship. I think with physical book my brain "maps" knowledge to something that's at beginning middle or end of book. And or it's keenly aware that this topot took two pagds thjs topic took 7 pages. Layout of tables and content and lists is firmer. Not sure how to explain it but I find that physical progression through the book solidifies it in my brain.
>> Also, when I try to remember something I have red on a printed book, - sometimes - I can remember where on the page it was written, what else was on the page, or even what the page looked like. I experience none of that when reading on my smartphone.
>This is so obvious to me but more than once I have hit the typical robot HN user on this topic for whom it doesn't matter the medium because he's an eidetic machine. So I'll just post this:
>> Beyond treating individual letters as physical objects, the human brain may also perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape. When we read, we construct a mental representation of the text in which meaning is anchored to structure. The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but they are likely similar to the mental maps we create of terrain—such as mountains and trails—and of man-made physical spaces, such as apartments and offices. Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters.
>>> The value provided by a physical map of a book is knowing how far along you are in the book, yet that's also available in a visual form in an ebook as well. You can even riffle through pages on most e-readers as well, seeing a preview of the page as you move quickly forward or backwards.
>>> Aside from weight, what value is the physical map really providing?
>> No, it provides more.
>> Actually your brain maps physical properties of the book to actual content, creating an overlay map over the story or the content (and our brain is really good at mentally mapping things). This is that map that is being used to know where in the book a particular piece of information is.
>> Besides, no e-reader today can let your riffle through pages as fast as paper book.
>> When you are in a novel, or in a manual, you have some kinetic and touch feedback to build memories of where's what. The book becomes an extension (à la proprioception) with much less friction than an e-...
Prefer physical books for everything except when I need to ctrl+f but there is usually a pdf version of the book I can do that on and then just actually go there on the physical.
I haven't used Javascript/Typescript for the few years and some needed to refresh it, so I bought a copy of Modern JavaScript for the Impatient. This is great book, can't recommend it highly enough. Few hours reading and I was up to speed.
The trick is though that you need to spend some time choosing a book. Random software book is crap. In my case I needed a concise refresher, so I found this specific book after reading reviews for bunch of the books on Amazon. I.e. before getting a book, figure out what you actually expect from it.
I have found ebooks (at least on my Kindle) make reading code very hard. Wraps code which is not a good look for a language like Python and not much code is shown on each page. Also I find that I can not flip back and forth when I need to check up on something
I can scan through a physical book by just flicking pages, the Kindle does not update fast enough
For non technical books, books that I will read in a linear manner, the Kindle is just fine
I like the physical book. Ebook readers just aren't large enough to accommodate the size that they print these books in, and I'd rather use my screen for the code I'm editing without needing to tab back to the book.
Same here, books on specific technologies are useless to me because you can learn more from the official manuals and playing with it than from someone else's interpretation of it X versions ago.
The tech books I do get are more meta, books about programming in general or design in general, things that you can't just find in a manual.
183 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 454 ms ] threadActually, I recently bought a couple of decades-old tech books of retrocomputing value. I found digital copies I regularly reference, but those books are so valuable I want backups.
That being said, I'm the author of an ebook about Rust and Security (Black Hat Rust[0]) that sold thousands of copies, and I've been asked a few times for a physical edition: some prefer to have the hardcopy version on the desk when studying and programming.
[0]https://kerkour.com/black-hat-rust
Cool book by the way I put it on my list of things to check out!
My reading increased 5-10x, b/c the friction to get that heavy book is gone. Also no more waking up the misses with a bed light, as the backlight is pretty subtle.
Sorry for the sales pitch, but these devices are just awesome.
I am not looking to be locked in for subscription just for pulling my notes from device to another PC
I remember remarkable saying the extra layer needed for the backlight would be detrimental for the writing experience.
I do it partly so I can dog-ear pages, write on them, and highlight them, but mostly because quite a few publishers still just absolutely suck at formatting code samples in e-books. as an industry, they're 20 years into it and they haven't figured it out, which is just pitiful, and paying attention to that on a publisher-by-publisher basis would be an absurd waste of memory.
if I buy an ebook, it's almost guaranteed to be one the author published themselves.
edit: the other reason I do it is I have very good memory when it comes to where in a book I saw something. I can often just pick up the book and open it to the exact page, even years afterwards. I recently did that with one of Elena Feranti's Neapolitan novels, and they're often over 1000 pages. I haven't seen anything equivalent with ebooks, so for me, in that particular respect, they're inferior.
This is the only reason I ordered a hardcopy.
Elixir and forth were the big exceptions.
So on the scale for the original question, ebook over regular books. I used to use physical books in the past, but with the broad availability of material on the web, my need for them dropped dramatically.
I also read article and watch related conferences
First is that the ebook annotation is clunkier than physical annotation, for various reasons (zooming, palm detection etc.).
In addition to finding the right pdf annotator, one needs to find the right tablet (I choose a tablet because I like colors and smooth movement); the vast majority of the tablets are geared towards video consumption, and they have the 16:9 form factor (which is terrible for ebooks reading).
The second is that once one find the most convenient pdf annotator, they will need to get into the ridicolous practice of buying ebooks, but then actually annotate pirated copies (otherwise, with DRM, one is bound to the producer's reader).
Nonetheless, I personally find digital reading overall preferrable over the physical counterpart. The experience of reading Cracking the coding interview, after many years of ebooks, was odd and not so comfortable.
You get what you pay for in a good book by a good author from a reputed publisher most of the time.
They're SO HEAVY, though, and since I live on the road my books are my heaviest possessions. I always end up giving them away when I'm done with them full of highlighted stuff which people actually seem to appreciate.
This is the last one I powered through which I recommend anyone writing go get a copy of:
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/concurrency-in-go/97814...
I read fiction as ebooks (basically exclusively since days of palm pilot and Treo, then kindle and phone and tablets), but far prefer physical books when learning a new topic including tech. Few reasons but I think it's at least partially because:
1. It's easier to mark or hold with my finger e.g. A table or reference or definition page, then return or glance at it as I progress next few pages of that topic. I find it hard to go back and forth in ebook,triply so on e-ink with slow refresh.
2. I cannot explain this but with ebook I don't get a sense of progression or framework relationship. I think with physical book my brain "maps" knowledge to something that's at beginning middle or end of book. And or it's keenly aware that this topot took two pagds thjs topic took 7 pages. Layout of tables and content and lists is firmer. Not sure how to explain it but I find that physical progression through the book solidifies it in my brain.
(I don't do much note taking or highlighting but I suppose it's good to have as an easy physical option. While I type all my work notes and my todos are electronic, I don't do really do electronic book annotation for whatever reason.)
Overall, it's at the point where existence of really good physical book may influence whether I dig into an optional technical / learning topic or not.
But they have zero portability, so to me they were not part of this comparison. If I am learning about a net new topic that I want to really dive into and engross myself and dedicate and get into the zone, I like to sit down on a comfy chair, lie down on the couch, or bench in a park, or best of all bring the book to shady lounge chair in Cuba lol! Kindle, tablet and physical book can do those things, my monitor setup less so :-)
As you say, I love ebooks for fiction. But the folks building these apps and devices still haven't hit on an interaction model that works well for non-fiction.
I might have three copies of the same book open at once. One for linear reading, one for search and one for cross referencing. Much better than a physical book. A bookmarks side-bar works well in e-readers if there are specific locations you regularly need access to.
Tablets and physical e-readers suck in comparison to a proper computer. You also might need to strip DRM to get out of some walled-garden reader that prevents you opening multiple instances of the same book. Copy paste is a killer feature for note taking (and another reason to ditch ecosystem readers that interfere with copy paste like Apple books).
I’ve never used or looked into non-ecosystem e-readers. Do you have any recommendations?
I don't use Calibre as a library tool, I find that pretty annoying. I just use a git repo with folders for genres and markdown file with each book for notes.
On Android I use ReadEra.
This is what I have in my notes for the settings. Just a result of iterative poking until I like it so the css is uh... not fit for a code review :)
# Font
# Colours # Page Layout > Padding # Misc # Headers and footers # Style > cssI read a lot of fiction on my Kindle, and it's never as satisfying as leafing through a paper novel. I don't read start to finish, I tend to go back to favorite passages, or to re-read a character's introduction some chapters before (and if I get lost, some other passage is sure to catch my eye!) and ebooks make this painful.
My way of reading is very "physical", for lack of a better word. Ebooks are not good for this at all.
I still like my Kindle, because nothing beats having hundreds of novels on a single lightweight device. But to me that's its biggest and almost only advantage. (Secondary: adjusting font size as my eyesight grows less precise with age).
I'll just post my favorite comment again (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30183933):
>> Also, when I try to remember something I have red on a printed book, - sometimes - I can remember where on the page it was written, what else was on the page, or even what the page looked like. I experience none of that when reading on my smartphone.
>This is so obvious to me but more than once I have hit the typical robot HN user on this topic for whom it doesn't matter the medium because he's an eidetic machine. So I'll just post this:
>> Beyond treating individual letters as physical objects, the human brain may also perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape. When we read, we construct a mental representation of the text in which meaning is anchored to structure. The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but they are likely similar to the mental maps we create of terrain—such as mountains and trails—and of man-made physical spaces, such as apartments and offices. Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters.
>https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-scr...
>And repost my comment from one of those times:
>>> The value provided by a physical map of a book is knowing how far along you are in the book, yet that's also available in a visual form in an ebook as well. You can even riffle through pages on most e-readers as well, seeing a preview of the page as you move quickly forward or backwards.
>>> Aside from weight, what value is the physical map really providing?
>> No, it provides more.
>> Actually your brain maps physical properties of the book to actual content, creating an overlay map over the story or the content (and our brain is really good at mentally mapping things). This is that map that is being used to know where in the book a particular piece of information is.
>> Reading on e-reader is more linear than reading a paper book. See: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-scr... https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.236/ and https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/19/readers-absorb...
>> Besides, no e-reader today can let your riffle through pages as fast as paper book.
>> When you are in a novel, or in a manual, you have some kinetic and touch feedback to build memories of where's what. The book becomes an extension (à la proprioception) with much less friction than an e-...
The trick is though that you need to spend some time choosing a book. Random software book is crap. In my case I needed a concise refresher, so I found this specific book after reading reviews for bunch of the books on Amazon. I.e. before getting a book, figure out what you actually expect from it.
I can scan through a physical book by just flicking pages, the Kindle does not update fast enough
For non technical books, books that I will read in a linear manner, the Kindle is just fine
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32889294
6 votes so far.
It’s my way of doing it. Might not be the best, but it works for me.
The tech books I do get are more meta, books about programming in general or design in general, things that you can't just find in a manual.