% mdfind -onlyin ~ kind:pdf |wc -l
11116
prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.pdf" | wc -l
18952
prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.epub" | wc -l
2385
prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.djvu" | wc -l
1384
prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.mobi" | wc -l
125
Honestly, don't ever buy bestsellers. They're all bad and everything in them is wrong. Things become bestsellers because they find an audience beyond people who are smart or shrewd. If you wait 5 years and you still want to read them, people will pay you to haul them off. Software books are great, especially for people who need paper to learn well, but they're outdated before they're released. Only good for tearing out the pages for hamster cage liner or padding shipping/moving boxes.
> I think it's way better to shop at a bookstore filled exclusively with stuff you've already shown interest in
In the context of technical/political pieces, perhaps. But I have some reservations with even that limited scope
1. It's fine to target a more general audience if it gets them interested in a subject to begin with. Some inaccuracies help give context to learning before you break them. e.g. Saying "you can't subtract 3 from 2" in early learning, before later learning about the negative number space.
2. How many books of this nature even make best seller? Most stuff tends to be fiction or biographical so there's not much "wrong" there. Political stuff will be there as well, but is ultimately subjective.
Taleb calls it the anti-library
They don't even print the books I'd want on the kinds of paper that would last more than 20 years, and I can't afford the sort of museum-level-preservation effort it would require to take advantage of that supposing they did.
I think if you can convert them into audio, then they'd have a better chance of getting consumed while doing an activity like cooking, working out, or walking. I find it hard now to find dedicated time for just reading a book.
Computer Lib by Ted Nelson. This used to be the, "Bible" before Nelson fell into relative obscurity. Ted Nelson was the first to coin the term, "Hypertext" in the 1960s after reading a famous article by Vannevar Bush
https://worrydream.com/refs/Nelson_T_1974_-_Computer_Lib,_Dr...
Mindstorms by Seymour Papert. Introduction to, "interfaces as pedagogy." This lays a foundation for, "what computer interfaces look like when you can use human intuition to work through them."
https://worrydream.com/refs/Papert_1980_-_Mindstorms,_1st_ed...
Jef Raskin was the original head of the Macintosh team. This treatise on humane design is invaluable and has been largely ignored. Any person that takes these ideas and makes them work will be a proverbial father of, "the next generation of computing."
https://archive.org/details/humaneinterfacen00rask
Douglas Engelbart who is often regard as, "the inventor of the mouse" founded his working philosophy by describing an operation paradigm for continued exponential improvement in groups. In some sense it's a masterwork in, "computer ethics."
https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/papers/scanned/Doug_Engel...
Early article describing Hyperlinking and aspects of the Internet some of which haven't been or have been under-realized. Imagine what, "social histories for extending research" would look like if taken seriously.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...
Computers As Theatre by Brenda Laurel; "think of the computer not as a tool but a medium." Brenda is an actress that applied Aristotle's Poetics to computer design. An absolute foundational classic.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~social/reading/Laurel-ComputersAsThe...
Worthy mention: Alan Kay's Quora. This is a literal goldmine of insights into the history of programming languages and computing paradigms. He'll answer your question if it's meaningful.
https://www.quora.com/profile/Alan-Kay-11
Remember: computer paradigms have changed every few decades. We started with pontifications by philosophers about the foundations of mathematics to mechanical machines to vacuum tube machines to (skipping some things) huge mainframes to mini-computers to linked personal computers (Engelbart) to the Xerox Alto. We now live in a world of castrated, linked post-Altos and a failed realization of portable computers in the form of b̶r̶a̶i̶n̶w̶a̶s̶h̶i̶n̶g̶-̶o̶u̶t̶r̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶c̶h̶i̶n̶e̶s̶ smartphones. Ask yourself-- what comes next? How can we significantly improve computers for human beings?
Edn. 1 is better than Edn. 2.
All, IMO.
Sure, its a 'pirate library'. But seriously, if public libraries were created in the last 20 years, they would be banned as well.
And that's also not saying anything about the AI companies, both targeting everything they can get their mitts on.