I love physical books as much as anyone. And when I really want to get a book into my brain, I now purchase both the hardcover and electronic editions. From the point of view of the publishing industry, I am the perfect customer. This also makes me a very important canary in the coal mine—and I’m here to report that I’ve begun to feel woozy.  For instance, I’ve started to think that most books are too long, and I now hesitate before buying the next big one. When shopping for books, I’ve suddenly become acutely sensitive to the opportunity costs of reading any one of them. If your book is 600 pages long, you are demanding more of my time than I feel free to give. And if I could accomplish the same change in my view of the world by reading a 60-page version of your argument, why didn’t you just publish a book this length instead?

Read the whole piece. This is the best articulation of the issue that I've ever seen.

One significant new feature of the second edition is the inclusion throughout the book of real examples of nearly all of the vulnerabilities that are covered. Any place you see a Try it! link, you can go online and work interactively with the example being discussed, to confirm that you can find and exploit the vulnerability it contains. There are several hundred of these labs, which you can work through at your own pace as you read the book. The online labs are available on a subscription basis for a modest fee, to cover the costs of hosting and maintaining the infrastructure involved.

This is stellar news...I'm camping for this book. Like for an iPhone. Jacket, chair, the whole deal. This (WAHH) is the best technical book in existence in my view.

Today an estimated 75 percent of online book purchases in the United States are made through Amazon, and its overall market share in book sales is astonishingly high. Some publishers make more than half of their sales through Amazon. So when Bezos rang the death knell for the physical book, people paid attention. Even before the Kindle, Amazon wielded enormous influence in the industry. Now it is positioned to control the e-book market and thereby the future of the publishing industry.

Perhaps even more interesting is that books sold on the Kindle are now outpacing the hardcover books Amazon sells. In the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books sold, Amazon.com has sold 143 Kindle books, they say. And that gap is getting wider. In the past month, for every 100 hardcover books sold, there have been 180 Kindle books sold through Amazon. This is across Amazon’s entire U.S. book business and even includes hardcovers that have no Kindle version.

Mark your calendars, friends and neighbors. This is a Gutenberg moment.