Jeff Brown blogged about SourceBeat.com yesterday. Jeff wondered whether the $29.95 price is too high for an electronic copy of a book. Jeff also mentioned people's preference of paper books over electronic ones.
I commented on the paper vs. electronic aspect, and offered my reasons for why I liked paper books and dislike electronic books.
Matt Riable, a SourceBeat author, reasoned against both the price and the paper vs. electronic concerns.
Here's more of my thoughts:
Books: There are different kind of books. In the "computer books" category there are the heavy-weight ones like the Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming and any one of the compiler books; then there are the best sellers like Thinking In Java, Java in a Nutshell; and then the longer shell life volumes such as the Design Patterns, Effective Java; and then the shorter lived Learn X 1.0.1 in 7 Minutes. There are fundamental differences between the categories. For example, for DEK's books the publisher is willing to wait for decades!
Electronic versions of Real Books: I bought all editions of Java In a Nutshell. I also bought the CD version of the same book at one time. I ended up throwing the CD away. The paper books are heavily used. So my dislike for online books are from my experience. Other people might have different experiences. Last year, when I had the choice to by either the paper version of the electronic version of Object-Oriented Perl, I opted for the paper edition, even though it's more expensive.
Books Bought But Never Read: I have bought my share of books that I was never able to finish, either because I lost interest in the subject or because they (author, publisher) lost interest in the subject. Struts In Action is an example. I never was on a Struts project and now the version of Struts described in the book is obsolete. I never finished Inside OLE, second edition, either. Almost all of my electronic books (free from TheServerSide.com, etc.) are unread. The exception being Paul Graham's On Lisp (I printed it out) and ESR's The Art of UNIX Programming (It's a website).
Product Documentations: They are not really books although they look like books. I never buy those. They (employer, client, project) have to buy them for me. They have to pay me for me to read them.
PDFs: PDFs are not meant to be read online!
Price: A good book is a good book. Price doesn't matter.
I stand by my claim: the more thought and effort an author put into a book, the more likely I will read it. (I have bought only a couple of Wrox books---Michael Kay's XSLT, and Rod Johnson's One-On-One. I did have the latest Pro JSP :) .)
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