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user-inactivated · 3304 days ago · link · · parent · post: On the Origin of Species voted most influential academic book in history.
I read a lot of new computing and math books and papers, because those are the fields I am educated in and I like to keep up (... and the kind of problems one gets outside of academia make me fear my brain liquefying and dribbling out of my ears). I do think academic books have much less influence now that professional demands force people to publish constantly, whether they have anything particularly interesting to say or not, and so there is a constant flood of half-baked, incomplete, and uninteresting work to plow through and if you don't work in academia you have to be very interested or very dedicated to bother.