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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Marc, it and its successors are great
books for sure, thanks for writing them! <br>
<br>
I like having access to digital works, no complaints about access
other than I wish I had access to everything ever written and some
way to sort through it all quickly and easily. I'm more inclined
to gripe about the quality of the work than it's medium. Both the
writing quality and the production quality. If the target is pdf,
make it a good pdf that when printed is a space considerate, easy
to read, and efficient to process work, and when it's target is
screen, do the same. <br>
<br>
My only real gripe about the medium, is the disconnect between
quality writing and production, and the unavoidable but hidden
nature of proportions that are inherent in the virtual medium. A
crazy example... I recently got out my 8086 handbook because I was
doing x64 assembly work and couldn't locate what I was looking for
in the x64 equivalent 10 volume set online. A quick flip through
the pages found what I needed and I was on my way. So, being a
thoughtful person ;), I figured it was just a matter of having the
book on hand, so I order one up... a week later, my x64 "manual
arrived", all 10 volumes in a box about 14 inches tall, and 8 1/2
by 11 and weighing, well, I only picked it up once, but it was
friggin' heavy as in bend the knees heavy. Anyhow, I dutifully
opened it up, pulled out the relevant "book", volume 3 part 3 or
something and flipped and flipped and flipped some more and found
the 8 pages discussing the same thing covered in a paragraph in
the 8086 book. Now, I realize that parallel pipelines of AVR 512
SIMPLEX/42 has some impact on the REPNZ command in situations
where the quarf rejects the quam, but really pages for a paragraph
and not because it required pages, they could have single spaced
the document, proportioned the margins to a readable width, put
the base cases in prominent positions and put the quarf and quam
notes in separate appendices. They didn't - they just keep adding
and adding and adding and the page count just keeps growing and
growing. Why? Because they can and because folks are hungry for
information.<br>
<br>
I appreciate that they put it out there, but is it ok for me to
wish it were of higher quality and to note that the old stuff was
better? BTW, I didn't read the 8086 manual back in the day, when
it was printed, I read it the day after I went looking at the x64
docs.<br>
<br>
Will<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
On 6/2/24 3:08 AM, Marc Rochkind wrote:<br>
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<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAOkr1zWE6OHC_d0ZbU3rni6NLRbyjp0XHHF1=AQ4fBgnezYbxg@mail.gmail.com">
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<div dir="auto">True enough, Kevin, but with the decline of
printed books and the increase in online docs, I rarely find
what I'm looking for in a printed book and, when I think I have,
the price is very high for what may turn out to be a bad guess.
Browsing a bookstore for serious computer books is no longer
possible, except maybe in very large cities.
<div dir="auto"><br>
</div>
<div dir="auto">For example, for an upcoming project I need
up-to-date and authoritative information on Kotlin and AWS S3
APIs.</div>
<div dir="auto"><br>
</div>
<div dir="auto">Living in the past, I find, is no help!</div>
<div dir="auto"><br>
</div>
<div dir="auto">Marc Rochkind</div>
<div dir="auto">(author of the first book on UNIX programming)</div>
</div>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, Jun 2, 2024, 7:12 AM
Kevin Bowling <<a href="mailto:kevin.bowling@kev009.com"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">kevin.bowling@kev009.com</a>>
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote"
style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">On
Sat, Jun 1, 2024 at 7:31 PM Will Senn <<a
href="mailto:will.senn@gmail.com" target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer" moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">will.senn@gmail.com</a>>
wrote:<br>
><br>
> Today, as I was digging more into nroff/troff and such,
and bemoaning the lack of brevity of modern text. I got to
thinking about the old days and what might have gone wrong
with book production that got us where we are today.<br>
><br>
> First, I wanna ask, tongue in cheek, sort of... As the
inventors and early pioneers in the area of moving from
typesetters to print on demand... do you feel a bit like the
Manhattan project - did you maybe put too much power into the
hands of folks who probably shouldn't have that power?<br>
><br>
> But seriously, I know the period of time where we went
from hot metal typesetting to the digital era was an eyeblink
in history but do y'all recall how it went down? Were you
surprised when folks settled on word processors in favor of
markup? Do you think we've progressed in the area of ease of
creating documentation and printing it making it viewable and
accurate since 1980?<br>
><br>
> I didn't specifically mention unix, but unix history is
forever bound to the evolution of documents and printing, so I
figure it's fair game for TUHS and isn't yet COFF :).<br>
><br>
> Later,<br>
><br>
> Will<br>
<br>
I think your other topic is closely related but I chose this
one to reply to.<br>
<br>
I own something well north of 10,000 technical and engineering
books<br>
so I will appoint myself as an amateur librarian.<br>
<br>
When I was younger, I had the false notion that anything new
is good.<br>
This attitude permates a lot of society. Including
professional<br>
libraries. They have a lot of collection management practices
around<br>
deciding what and when to pitch something and a big one is
whether the<br>
work is still in print, while a more sophisticated collection
will<br>
also take into account circulation numbers (how often it is
checked<br>
out). A lot of that is undoubtedly the real costs surrounding
storing<br>
and displaying something (an archived book has a marginal
cost, a<br>
publically accessible displayed book presumably has a higher<br>
associated cost) as well as the desire to remain current and
provide<br>
value to the library's membership.<br>
<br>
From what I have seen, there isn't much notion of retaining or<br>
promoting a particular work unless it remains in print. As an<br>
example, K&R C is still in print and would be retained by
most<br>
libraries. The whole thing becomes a bit ouroboros because
that leads<br>
to more copies being printed, and it remaining in collections,
and<br>
being read. Obviously, this is a case of a great piece of
work<br>
benefiting from the whole ordeal. But for more niche topics,
that<br>
kind of feedback loop doesn't happen. So the whole thing
comes down<br>
in a house of cards... the publisher guesses how many books to
print,<br>
a glut of them are produced, they enter circulation, and then
it goes<br>
out of print in a few years. A few years later it is purged
from the<br>
public libraries. As an end user, one benefit to this
collapse is<br>
that used books are basically flooded into the market and you
can get<br>
many books for a fraction of their retail price used.. but it
becomes<br>
difficult to know _what_ to get if you don't have an expert
guide or<br>
somewhere to browse and select for yourself.<br>
<br>
So why does this all matter to your more meta question of why
less<br>
great books? There is less to no money in it nowadays for
authors.<br>
The above example of library circulation represented a large
number of<br>
guaranteed sales to wealthy institutions (academic and
government =<br>
wealth, don't let them pretend otherwise). Except now many
libraries<br>
have downsized their physical collections to make room for
multimedia<br>
or just lower density use of space. So there are less
guaranteed<br>
sales.<br>
<br>
Another facet of the same coin, one reason printed books are
great has<br>
to do with the team surrounding their production. If you look
near<br>
the colophon, you will often find a textbook will have quite a
few<br>
people involved in moving a manuscript to production. This
obviously<br>
costs a lot of money. As things move more to ebook and print
on<br>
demand, it's an obvious place to cut publishing expenses and
throw all<br>
the work directly onto the author. That may result in cheaper
books<br>
and maybe(?) more revenue for the author, but it won't have
the same<br>
quality that a professional publishing team can bring to the
table.<br>
<br>
As to my deliberate decision to accumulate the dead trees and
ink,<br>
it's because although online docs are great I find my best
learning is<br>
offline while I use the online docs more like mental jogs for
a<br>
particular API or refamiliarizing myself with the problem
domain. I<br>
have some grandeur ambitions that first involve a large
scanning<br>
project but that will have to await more self funding.<br>
<br>
Regards,<br>
Kevin<br>
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