[Zigurd]

I wrote several books. My first book was terrible but sold very well because there was no Stackoverflow, OS platforms did not spend enough to support developers, and their documentation sucked. None of these are true anymore. Also printed books as a medium is in sharp decline. My later books were much better books but sold fewer and fewer copies.

Now I do tiktoks on current topics of interest mixed with my project management content. That will probably turn into a series of YouTube long form video lessons.

[WoodenChair]

I took the liberty of looking up your books from your Hacker News profile. Perhaps they are not all listed there, but the most recent one you listed I think is on a much more niche topic ("Enterprise Android" as opposed to say your prior title "Programming Android") than the prior ones. Even if it's a better book, that won't outweigh that there's just a much smaller audience.

Personally, I think my first book, 10 years ago, was my best book but it sold much worse than my later books because the topic was too niche.

Also, there are many, many more programmers now than there were before. Maybe they don't read books as much as their predecessors did, but to say Stack Overflow and open source platforms killed technical book publishing is highly inaccurate. I honestly think you're projecting a "you" situation to talk about the whole market. Please don't take that as an attack, but just as an additional perspective.

[Zigurd]

My first book C Programing Techniques for the Macintosh was pretty niche. For example, it required third-party compilers and other tools to do self-hosted development on a 512k Mac. But you had to buy it because Apple's documentation had no tutorial content at all, just an API reference.

If you look at Google's documentation of Android now, you don't need to supplement it.

[WoodenChair]

> If you look at Google's documentation of Android now, you don't need to supplement it.

Which speaks to the lack of need for books in certain elements of the Android market, but not to technical publishing more generally.

[perlgeek]

> My later books were much better books but sold fewer and fewer copies.

This resonates with me. I've written and published a few books, and the one I'm most proud of has sold the last.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1484232275/ has a 5.0 star rating on Amazon (at 20 ratings), and I've gotten lots of positive feedback about it via email, chat and in person. The topic is just so niche that virtually nobody cares :-)

[bornfreddy]

(I apologize in advance for offering unsolicited advice)

As someone who is interested in the topic of regexes and parsing, Perl in the subject made me... uninterested. I know this is a sample of size 1, but maybe splitting the principles / theory from the language would make sense?