[chandler]

>> ...we laugh and think, "Who the hell would buy that?"

I'd speculate that this arrogance is more a consequence of the content being sold than the format it's being sold in.

If someone wrote a "real scaling with memcached" (or whatever) ebook, with actual setup, use cases, performance numbers, patterns, etc, I suspect the users here would be intrigued.

Sure, much of the information could be gleaned from blog postings and READMEs, but how much would it be worth for all the topics to be aggregated and treated with a consistent depth?