Ask HN: Do you still buy physical tech books like “Learn Rust” or “Learn Go”?

That being said, I'm the author of an ebook about Rust and Security (Black Hat Rust[0]) that sold thousands of copies, and I've been asked a few times for a physical edition: some prefer to have the hardcopy version on the desk when studying and programming.

[0]https://kerkour.com/black-hat-rust

I do it partly so I can dog-ear pages, write on them, and highlight them, but mostly because quite a few publishers still just absolutely suck at formatting code samples in e-books. as an industry, they're 20 years into it and they haven't figured it out, which is just pitiful, and paying attention to that on a publisher-by-publisher basis would be an absurd waste of memory.

if I buy an ebook, it's almost guaranteed to be one the author published themselves.

edit: the other reason I do it is I have very good memory when it comes to where in a book I saw something. I can often just pick up the book and open it to the exact page, even years afterwards. I recently did that with one of Elena Feranti's Neapolitan novels, and they're often over 1000 pages. I haven't seen anything equivalent with ebooks, so for me, in that particular respect, they're inferior.