What’s the purpose of buying technical design/development books?
I’ve got quite a collection of web design and development books covering every topic from typography to color to XHTML/CSS and every development language imaginable. I’ve even got 3-4 books on the same topic for some things. But over the past year or so I’ve found myself becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the books that have been coming on on various web topics lately.
It’s not so much that the contents of these books is irrelevant or badly written. What I’ve found myself thinking every time I crack open any of these books at Barnes & Noble is that I say to myself, “I could just find this online.”
So this got me thinking. Where will books, more specifically “web related” books, be in the next 5-10 years? The 37signals Getting Real book distributed as a PDF was a massive success and more authors seem to be going that route.
And even more than just “digital” books…will there really even be a direct need for entire books on topics? Practically ever bit of technical info you could possibly need is a simple search away.
Do you prefer books over searching online? Or the other way? And why?
