No one buys books

I recently started buying paper books.

Yes, it's not particularly ecological, but I found that I'm able to focus at the text much better this way. My Kindle (despite plenty of obvious advantages) just doesn't really work for me.

It took me years to realize this, but I always start to tinker with the brightness settings, switch pages back and forth, go into the book library and back, play with highlighting words, etc. I will do anything instead of reading the text. Meanwhile with a paper book I don't have an urge to flip a page back and forth and observe how it behaves. I can focus on the text.

Not sure why I am this way.

Technical books are part of it, and O’Reilly can probably do much more accurate forecasting on their titles than others do, but they still have total reach problems.

If I think of all the technical things I’ve done, there are some I’ve bought lots of books for, and others I’ve never bought a book at all, including some relatively major languages.

Anecdotally I'm buying and reading more books now than at any other point in my life.

Reading gets me away from a computer screen, which I would otherwise stare at from sunrise to sundown.

I tend to be a late adopter. Once things are close to obsolete I usually get involved!

Although books have the disadvantage of being a similar focal distance as a screen and for this reason is still bad for my eyesight!

And even with books it becomes much easier to say “I’ll reread the lord of the rings on this flight” than it is to take a wild risk on an unknown book and author.

Just going to drop this here: https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-...

This comes up constantly and it’s just wrong.