written on October 13, 2026, read March 2023
At some point, you burn your last CD without knowing it’s the last time. At some point, you buy your last DVD without knowing your collection will never grow again.
I bought this book in 2023. It probably has the dubious honour of being the last technical book I’ll ever buy. When I bought it, I had no idea it would be the last of its kind to find its way onto my shelf.
I think the age of IT books is over. The first blow came from the legions of tutorials on blogs, videos and forums. LLMs will deliver the second. Who still works their way through 1,000 pages of paper when they can simply ask an LLM to generate the config file they need – without even having to think about it? At my local bookshop, the shelf space for IT books has already shrunk considerably.
I don’t know whether I should welcome this development. But I fear that in future, books like this will often be generated by LLMs anyway. And then I might as well just ask the LLM.
My shelves hold technical books going back more than 30 years. At some point, I noticed I was buying fewer of them every year. Much of it is hopelessly outdated, some of it completely irrelevant.
You might be annoyed about the money you spent, but there’s another side to it: the author invested part of his life by investing time. And eventually, technological change renders that investment obsolete – slowly at first, then faster and faster.
Just like the part of their life the author poured into that Novell NetWare 3.11 book I bought more than 30 years ago.