GoKawiilThere was, for a long time, a wall.
If you walked into a book store, past the magazines and the cookbooks, you’d arrive at the computer section, and along one wall there was a stretch of books with cartoon animals on their covers. A rhino for JavaScript. A camel for Perl. A python (obviously) for Python. And whatever this was:
They were thick, they cost about $50, and they had titles like “Learning React” and “HTTP: The Definitive Guide”. If you wanted to learn how to do a thing on a computer, you bought one of these, took it home, and opened it up next to your computer and typed what it said until the thing worked.
That wall is smaller now. If it’s even still there. In some stores the wall is gone and relegated to a small rack that has six books on it, three of which are about ChatGPT.
Through the first nine months of 2023, sales in the “computer book” category at Circana BookScan (the industry’s standard tracker, which costs roughly the price of a small used car to subscribe to) were down 16.9% year over year. Publishers Weekly, which had been dutifully reporting these figures in its quarterly narrative summaries, kept doing so right up through that 16.9% figure, and then in 2024 and 2025 simply stopped mentioning the category by name.
To be clear, books in general are doing fine. Total U.S. print sales reached 762.4 million units in 2025, up 0.3% over 2024, which was itself up 0.5% over 2023. The category that is in trouble is the part of it that teaches you how to make software. The American Association of Publishers’ “professional books” segment, which is the rough corporate proxy for “books your employer might buy you,” fell 22.3% in August 2025.
The book industry is fine but the technical end is bleeding out.
Quickly and quietly. There was no Napster moment for the programming book. Nobody filed a lawsuit. The publishers did not, as far as I can tell, even hold a press conference. We simply found one day that they stopped reporting the category itself. The category doesn’t die, it just stops being talked about.
You already know why, more or less. ChatGPT has over 900 million monthly active users. GitHub Copilot has 4.7 million paying subscribers as of January 2026, up roughly 75% in a year. You can’t imagine writing software without Claude Code anymore.
Stack Overflow is receiving about 3,800 questions a month, which is what it was getting in 2008, before it had finished being launched. The chatbots have eaten the demand for the kinds of answers that programming books used to provide.
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