[dar8919]

Both.

When it comes to technology, I find books to be a secondary citizen. If I look at things I know and use in my day job. Things like stack overflow, blog posts and reading man pages have been my primary knowledge sources.

But off late, I've been reading books and mostly enjoying the titles I've read. But the biggest problem for me is finding my next book.

Amazon mostly recommends titles very closely related to what I've purchased, and I haven't had much success with goodreads lists. So I'm curious how HN users find their next book.

[gershwin]

I discover books through three sources:

1) New releases from publishers/editors/authors I like. If you like 3 books from one publisher, you're probably more likely to like another book from that publisher despite its topic. Same for editors. And, for authors although author releases are less frequent than editors which are less frequent than publishers.

2) Colleagues and friends. Word of mouth still seems to be the number one way people discover books. Ask your friends what they are currently reading. Hop over to GoodReads.com and see if you can find a network that reads genres similar to what you like.

3) Blogs/forums. We like to talk about what we're reading since that makes an otherwise rather solo activity more social. Search the personal/academic/company blogs for topics you like.

Finally, why not create a hacker news thread called "What are you currently reading?" :)