[TUHS] Proliferation of book print styles

[Marc Rochkind]

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.

For example, for an upcoming project I need up-to-date and authoritative
information on Kotlin and AWS S3 APIs.

Living in the past, I find, is no help!

Marc Rochkind
(author of the first book on UNIX programming)

On Sun, Jun 2, 2024, 7:12 AM Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling at kev009.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 1, 2024 at 7:31 PM Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > 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?
> >
> > 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?
> >
> > 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 :).
> >
> > Later,
> >
> > Will
>
> I think your other topic is closely related but I chose this one to reply
> to.
>
> I own something well north of 10,000 technical and engineering books
> so I will appoint myself as an amateur librarian.
>
> When I was younger, I had the false notion that anything new is good.
> This attitude permates a lot of society.  Including professional
> libraries.  They have a lot of collection management practices around
> deciding what and when to pitch something and a big one is whether the
> work is still in print, while a more sophisticated collection will
> also take into account circulation numbers (how often it is checked
> out).  A lot of that is undoubtedly the real costs surrounding storing
> and displaying something (an archived book has a marginal cost, a
> publically accessible displayed book presumably has a higher
> associated cost) as well as the desire to remain current and provide
> value to the library's membership.
>
> From what I have seen, there isn't much notion of retaining or
> promoting a particular work unless it remains in print.  As an
> example, K&R C is still in print and would be retained by most
> libraries.  The whole thing becomes a bit ouroboros because that leads
> to more copies being printed, and it remaining in collections, and
> being read.  Obviously, this is a case of a great piece of work
> benefiting from the whole ordeal.  But for more niche topics, that
> kind of feedback loop doesn't happen.  So the whole thing comes down
> in a house of cards... the publisher guesses how many books to print,
> a glut of them are produced, they enter circulation, and then it goes
> out of print in a few years.  A few years later it is purged from the
> public libraries.  As an end user, one benefit to this collapse is
> that used books are basically flooded into the market and you can get
> many books for a fraction of their retail price used.. but it becomes
> difficult to know _what_ to get if you don't have an expert guide or
> somewhere to browse and select for yourself.
>
> So why does this all matter to your more meta question of why less
> great books?  There is less to no money in it nowadays for authors.
> The above example of library circulation represented a large number of
> guaranteed sales to wealthy institutions (academic and government =
> wealth, don't let them pretend otherwise).  Except now many libraries
> have downsized their physical collections to make room for multimedia
> or just lower density use of space.  So there are less guaranteed
> sales.
>
> Another facet of the same coin, one reason printed books are great has
> to do with the team surrounding their production.  If you look near
> the colophon, you will often find a textbook will have quite a few
> people involved in moving a manuscript to production.  This obviously
> costs a lot of money.  As things move more to ebook and print on
> demand, it's an obvious place to cut publishing expenses and throw all
> the work directly onto the author.  That may result in cheaper books
> and maybe(?) more revenue for the author, but it won't have the same
> quality that a professional publishing team can bring to the table.
>
> As to my deliberate decision to accumulate the dead trees and ink,
> it's because although online docs are great I find my best learning is
> offline while I use the online docs more like mental jogs for a
> particular API or refamiliarizing myself with the problem domain.  I
> have some grandeur ambitions that first involve a large scanning
> project but that will have to await more self funding.
>
> Regards,
> Kevin
>
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