[icebraining]

Around 2005 it became fairly easy to download, for free, practically any book. It might be coincidence that 10 of 13 of these Must-Read books were written prior to 2005.

Yes, it might be coincidence. Or it might be that the set of books written prior to 2005 spans 30 years (since the first Lambda paper), while from 2005 to today there's only been 9 years.

Even taking the date of the last paper as its publishing date (1980), if we assume that each year has the same probability of having a book on the list, we should expect only 9/34 ~= 26% of the Must-Read books to be published after 2005.

And as it happens, 3/13 is ~23%, well within a reasonable margin of error.

[dredmorbius]

While the pre/post duration is of interest, there's also generally been a tremendous increase in the volume of technical publishing. xkcd has a plot of scientific publishing over time: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/58.full

http://theoceanofknowledge.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/infog...

There's the question of whether or not publishing is increasing within fields or that there's more publishing in new areas, but it seems to me that there should be an accelerating trend in publishing. Your assumption that each year is equally likely to be represented strikes be as questionable.

[icebraining]

And there's obviously been an increase in technical publishing of software matters: before we just had books, now he have books, plus blog posts, plus online white papers, plus videos, etc.

I don't see how an increase in the publishing of scholarly papers implies an expected increase in books, specifically.

[dredmorbius]

Books and academic publishing are related, if not identical, activities. I'd expect there'd be some correlation. And the data for academic publishing happened to be handy.

I suppose its probably possible to extract data from other sources -- ibiblio, perhaps -- for books, but that would involve work.

There's also the matter that the xkcd infographic shows long-term trends. It's entirely possible that there've been changes in recent years. Though that would also be pretty remarkable.

The huge increase in online access to content and information has a bigger effect though. I was purchasing a large number of books through the mid 2000s, far fewer since. The fact that numerous physical bookstores I could head to and shelf-browse have closed doesn't much help matters (I hate buying anything online, books included, especially via Amazon).