4 ms·

I'm the author of O'Reilly's "Learning Go". Here are the last 13 months of paperback book sales: - Mar 2026: 124 - Feb 2026: 140 - Jan 2026: 157 - Dec

• guywithahat 4mo ago
  I appreciate your response, it's great seeing real data and getting to form opinions on it this way.
• KnuthIsGod 4mo ago
  Thank you for your excellent book. Your book is highly recommended in the Go community. I will definitely be reading it once I finish "The Go programming language".
• arm32 4mo ago
  How do you feel about these LLMs potential piracy of your book?
  • jonbodner 4mo ago
    It’s not potential, it’s actual. There are court cases and settlements and everything. I’ll be getting a little money from Anthropic. As for how I feel, I think that LLM companies are incredibly short sighted. If I was them, I’d be funding newspapers, non fiction writers, fiction writers, and artists in general in exchange for the exclusive rights to index. They get content to improve their models and the world gets new knowledge and art. But considering the public good is passé and LLMs have done pretty well by stealing everything. This might be why I’m not a billionaire.
• runjake 4mo ago
  2 of May 2026 is me! Learning Go is such a great book.
  • eager_learner 4mo ago
    what's so good about it? I bought it as well, but I have yet to start it (I'm stuck in some other books for now).
• keyle 4mo ago
  It's also relative to the employment numbers. Companies are shrinking body counts, so you have less buyers of programming books.
• Dban1 4mo ago
  hi Jon!
• sevenzero 4mo ago
  >which have indexed all of the books and used pirated copies to do so Funnily enough, people on HN often do not consider this an issue, like at all... I wonder how they'd think about it if they had created something (meaningful) that was subjected to this. I love Go and learned it a lot in the past 2 years but ultimately put it down in favor of more "batteries included" solutions as I don't trust myself enough as a dev to confidently handle concurrency in Go. Still, it's a beautiful language and if I ever come back I hope I can still find books about it, as I hate using AI for learning.
  • gchamonlive 4mo ago
    I have a different impression, that the folks here are divided in this issue, with a half being AI maximalists saying it's a necessary evil while the other half condemning such practices, maybe not as much as to protect copyright per se, but because there are two different measures here. While teenagers get ridiculous fines for sharing MP3, big corp gets the free pass for stealing data on a industrial scale.
    • sevenzero 4mo ago
      If AI was public domain and free for everyone, I would have less issues with it (not saying no issues). But yeah, the only people actually benefiting from this are big tech corps who actively destroy society since over a decade now. The argument about the ability to self host doesn't really make sense to me given that most of society can not even afford RAM at the moment. So all these big tech frontier models should be public domain.
      • dspillett 4mo ago
        > because of economic pressures Self-hosting isn't relevant here anyway. When discussing the hoovering up of information irrespective of licences to produce the model, where the model is finally run isn't significant. You might not be paying the industry pirates-at-scale to run a model on their hardware, but you are still using the same information, irrespective of the same desires of its creators, the same way, just in a different location. Heck, local hosting might even be making the situation worse if people are trying to train their own model because they are then likely to be scraping data too, and becoming part of the army of bots that are pushing hosting costs up and forcing everyone to use tricks like PoW scripts that can inconvenience human readers as much as the scrapers.
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• kaffekaka 4mo ago
  Your book was my path to Go. Thank you! Having a physical book means much to me.
• blub 4mo ago
  Yours is a good book (got both editions myself), but sadly language learning books will be hit the hardest by AI. Partly it’s what you said regarding copyright washing, but the other big reason is that people will code less; I am writing little to no golang and am prompting it instead. The book is still useful to me, since I want to continue to understand what’s happening, review code, etc, however I expect that my kind of software engineer will be in the minority in the future. If you publish a 3rd edition and I’m not replaced by AI by then, I’ll buy it. :) On other topics, using AI can fill some gaps, but books summarizing years of hard-won knowledge are priceless. NoStarch is amazing when it comes to such resources. They have an upcoming book on Linux kernel Memory Management for example, the classic Linux tome from Kerrisk and very specialized security books. On the other hand I cancelled my O’Reilly sub because I didn’t read enough to make it worth the price and now I purchase DRM-free e-books individually, as needed.
• jamiecurle 4mo ago
  I cancelled my O'Reilly subscription because it's cheaper for me to buy the books from the publisher. I go through one book every few months. I thought I'd go through more with unlimited access but I didn't. $539.88 a year vs maybe $140-$200 I spend on books (I take advantage of discount codes when they come up). I also like to go back to books. I cannot do that with the O'Reilly platform when a subscription ends. I hear you and agree on the unlicensed training point - it is a form piracy.
  • rustyhancock 4mo ago
    I'm similar, I think perhaps it's a generational thing which slightly modified the title in a pedantic way. The people who "grew up" with text books still crack new ones and old ones. The current generation turning 18-21 don't. It surprises me because I'm often asked why I knew X or Y odd perhaps esoteric fact or design pattern. Usually it's because I came across it in a book interested in something else. It's that peripheral knowledge that is being lost when people use LLMs, and quick start guides. Historically you'd have a team where skill, knowledge and experience was very variable but each person often brought another piece of the puzzle to a team. Increasingly people have narrow knowledge "bases". Does it matter? Perhaps not but it definitely has taken some of the joy of discussing problems and solutions out of my working life.
    • whimblepop 4mo ago
      > It surprises me because I'm often asked why I knew X or Y odd perhaps esoteric fact or design pattern. Usually it's because I came across it in a book interested in something else. It was like this in the days when the primary shortcut was StackOverflow as well. People who are allergic to RTFM treat things that are covered in the docs as "esoteric" knowledge because they never read anything except as a shortcut to solving their immediate problem. I think the stats are clear that reading is in decline in general, though. I'm sure LLMs will add to this much like YouTube has.
    • graemep 4mo ago
      Surely people still use textbooks for formal education? This has to be something that happens later.
• chris_money202 4mo ago
  Might also be because of Anna’s Archives
• nticompass 4mo ago
  This has nothing to do with the article posted or anything, I was just curious... who gets to pick the animal on the book cover? Do you (the author) get to pick, or does the publisher (O'Reilly) pick?
  • rob74 4mo ago
    Do you mean the animal in general, or what specific image? For Go specifically, it would be very surprising if it was not a gopher! Ok, Python is obviously even more closely associated with the snake, but a gopher has been the Go mascot from the very beginning (the original design being drawn by the wife of one of the language's co-creators)...
    • nticompass 4mo ago
      I meant in general. For whatever reason, I forgot that Go uses a gopher as its mascot. But like, their PHP books don't use an elephant. I dunno, I was just curious if the author could pick an animal to be on the cover, or if it wasn't their choice.
  • jonbodner 4mo ago
    For Go it had to be a Gopher (as it is the mascot for the language). My editor showed me the artwork and I approved it.
• pixel_popping 4mo ago
  Just want to say this is quite informative and helpful, thank you for the transparency.
• joseda-hg 4mo ago
  This is not a jab at you (or your book), But I always assumed O'Reilly's per book sales would be significantly larger, like 4 figures at the minimum
  • jonbodner 4mo ago
    Yeah. I don’t think people are aware of how few books are purchased. At this moment, Learning Go is 45,855 on Amazon US across all physical books. This is in the top few percent of book sales. The number tends to bounce between the 50,000s and the 30,000s, but sometimes slips higher or lower. One or two sales in a week moves a book quite a bit.
  • tomwheeler 4mo ago
    Aside from any downward trend attributable to LLMs, technical book sales were always lower than most people would have imagined. I've known a few authors who published with O'Reilly and other major publishers and most told me that they made less than minimum wage in the end. There were other benefits, such as increased name recognition and credibility that let them charge more as consultants, but the direct proceeds from writing a technical book seldom paid off even two decades ago.
    • joseda-hg 4mo ago
      In general I get that, but O'Reilly has enough prestige/recognition that I assumed they'd be the top outliers, if they don't break the thousands, I assume basically no one does in the field (Barring books for beginners, that have a significantly larger potential buyer pool)
• mrbonner 4mo ago
  I bought 3 programming books last month including this one. I really enjoy “Learning Go” over the official go book.
• tmaly 4mo ago
  I still enjoy buying paper books and reading them. There is something different about having something physical.