[JacobSeated]

Not to devalue the tireless work of authors, but we must also recognize that students in particular do not have enough money to pay for all these books.

At the same time, it can be argued that writing a single book, and selling it thousands times over, is a bit to "easy" in terms of ways to make money. The hard part is to get people to actually buy your book – it does not matter that you wrote the best book in the world if nobody gives you well deserved attention for it.

Bloggers suffer from the same problem, and it is not necessarily because their work is bad. The truth of the matter just is, nobody cares about quality information anymore (And I am guilty of this as well).

We want fast and summarized answers so we can move on to the important part: solving whatever concrete problem we are working on.

AI will probably delude the little remaining value of information even further, and at a point, nobody will manually write comprehensive information anymore. At least not unassisted by AI, and while the quality may suffer, we must also realize that we do not really need 100% accurate information. If we get a statistically significant amout of accurate AI provided information, then there is no need for anyone to write books anymore. It will be a complete unappreciated waste of their time, and nobody is going to buy them.

Even now that I am in a decent job, I still prefer not to buy books, instead relying on free sources on the internet (not piracy). If a given book/information is not available for free, then it is often not important enough for me to bother (note often – not always).

It is also a matter of prioritizing – reading a book takes me way too long, and the process is far-from comfortable due to my slow reading, and for that reason alone I tend to avoid reading entire books. It strikes me as an antiquated way to gain information even without AI. I may open a specific chapter of interest, but reading the entire thing is painfully tedious, and probably unnecessary.

[taopai]

I read lots of non fiction books. I think the same.

Most of them could condense it's contents in a couple of chapters.

It would be great to have modular books, like Emacs manual. If sections where independent modules you could rearange the book or even create books from a series of sections from diferent books.

That way you could choose different outlines, maybe predefined by the author like, to create books tailed to your needs:

- General Ideas.

- General Ideas + observed cases

- Mixed outline (Concepts + Stories + Conclusions)

- All details about one topic

[generalizations]

This is what's done with sufficiently academic books in the hard sciences. They are so modular, that books are simply topics with each chapter written by a chosen author, and those authors will treat the chapters they've written similarly to papers they've had published.

I think if you dive deeper in to more rigorous nonfiction books you'll find that less time is spent on the 'pop' side of popsci literature. Which might be where you're encountering that fluff.

[whycome]

I hate to bring it up, but AI would be perfect for that. It could create logical segues between the new chapter order. So you could basically create books on demand based on real content with only the AI providing context.

[getwiththeprog]

"writing a single book, and selling it thousands times over, is a bit to "easy" in terms of ways to make money"

$2 profit per book is perhaps a high figure that an author may recieve from the publisher. 2 x 3000 is $6000 for maybe months or years of work. And this would be a 'successful' author. It's not all JK Rowling out there ya know!

[fikama]

I am curious, what books you found important enough to bother? So my list of (shame) books to read could grow even longer.

[squigz]

Why do people buy books now, instead of just reading reviews?

[eclecticfrank]

Obvious troll, but anyway: Reviews are there to help identify if books are worth reading/buying. Reviews cannot and are not supposed to replace books.

[sycamoretrees]

Why do people go to see movies when they could just watch the trailer on YouTube?

[DiggyJohnson]

I don't understand this question. Book reviews are not summaries. And even they were, "why do people read books, instead of just reading summaries?" is still a ridiculous question.

[charcircuit]

>but we must also recognize that students in particular do not have enough money to pay for all these books.

Sure they do. They happen to be able to pay for food, water, electricity, rent, tuition, transportation, pens, pencils, paper, etc just fine.

[JR1427]

Academic books are terribly expensive.

When I was at university (Oxford, UK, 2009), I bought about four key books, and spent well over 100GBP. I simply couldn't afford more. I had a student loan which covered tuition and some of my living costs, as well as a bursary from the university which covered some of my other living costs (but not all!).

What was annoying was that our library didn't have enough books for all the students. We'd all be assigned the same reading list for the week, and then have to race to the library to get the books before they were all gone.

[gizajob]

If people could download any of those things for free off the internet, they would.

[fragmede]

by "just fine", you mean "go into crippling amounts of debt that isn't dischargeable by bankruptcy"?

[webefbskj]

Imagine someone from a 3rd world country. Let's say India.

Even the books like K&R C, Tanenbaum operating systems or CLRS / Skienna Algorithms will be north of 1000 INR in India.

Count 5 - 6 such books per semester, that's at least 5k - 10k INR. But for obscure books the price often goes to 5K for a single book. Let's say 10K INR.

Which is a significant amount, and for some students can exceed a month's living expenses for a semester.

So they're hesitant to spend that much. Often they end up with shittily written local books.

Now imagine you want to consult some book for specialist topics, like Windows internals or something, you will have to sell an organ.

Source: I was the Indian student.

[abridges6523]

“Just fine” here means riddled with debt.