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Why Are Tech Books So Expensive?
Hellboy0101 asks: "Once again, I found myself sifting through my local Barnes and Noble for technical books. I don't do this very often, and apparently just enough time passes for me forget how expensive these books are. I can't help but think it's the fleecing of technology workers and enthusiasts, much like OEMs clearly take advantage of gamers with their unreasonably high prices. There certainly are some glaring and welcome exceptions to this rule. But my question is this: Why do they charge this much for books, and are we actually part of the problem by continuing to pay it?"
I know somebody will probably reply with some "supply & demand" rebuttal, but either way...
One of my old co-workers wrote a book on C# when it was becoming popular. One of the things that he stressed is that there is no money in writing books - you do it essentially for the love, and if you make a couple extra dollars, that's a bonus. Presumably tech books don't really sell that awful many copies, but it still costs a substantial amount to print off all those pages. I think the price of the books is a reflection of the relatively niche market that these books are looking to serve a need for, especially considering that most geeks can and likely do get a substantial portion of their information from the internet (the variety of info never hurt anybody, either - we've all seen the books that serve up less-than-ideal principles).
Of course, if you're talking about books you get for college classes, that's a whole different matter. In that case, they rape you just because they can.
Anyway, that's my $0.02. They need to make *some* money on the book, but they don't really sell enough copies to be able to get the substantial discounts that you'd like to see.
A community-oriented lyrics site
So you gamble and throw away a nominal sum in hopes that it helps you get your job done (which is invaluable to you because it provides the resources for living). Fifty dollars is worth it for a tool that keeps me employed.
What I don't understand is why there isn't a discount for students. In college, I once ordered a book only to find it was the "overseas" paperback edition. Beware of these, not only are they fake but they will not last to heavy use and have no color/durability.
What confuses me are the most is that some of my favorite books are the most the expensive. Among them:
Why? These books are standards and needed by everyone. They should be able to capitalize off the popularity by lowering the price. Surely it doesn't take $120 to make Mitchell's Machine Learning--it's such a tiny book!
I guess all I can do is blame the presses like John Wiley & Sons or McGraw Hill that seem to be the perpetrators of selling such expensive paper. Perhaps these are the results of botched initial contracts between author and publisher?
I would wager that, upon the initial deal, a lot of authors agree to anything. One of these conditions might be that the before hand assumption is that the tech book will not sell well. And therefore, they charge a lot to make up for possible losses. If the book sells well, then why lower the price? Just keep it high and rake in the profits while the author gets what his contract says.
A friend who worked at B&N once told me that tech books are the most abused books. People would "buy" the technology of the month book, then return it days later saying it wasn't what they were looking for. I think the volatility of technology and the fact that it changes almost monthly tends to cause problems for publishers. So they price them high in an effort to preemptively curb their losses.
My work here is dung.
ROI
mass market paperbooks like sci fi have larger audiences, and can sit on the shelf for years..
tech books have small audiences, and a short shelf life.
Do you want to by a book on windows 95 in 2006? no? but you can still pick up a copy of Asimov robots of dawn...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance.
I'm sure they have a healthy margin, but a big part of the price is that they have a small market. The fixed costs(paying the author and stuff like that) are distributed across a relatively small number of books, driving the price up.
Besides, if someone making ~$40,000 a year gains 3 hours of productivity, $40 isn't that much to pay for it.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Supply and demand -- despite the fact that you dismiss it in your question, these are really the determining factors.
:) )
If you want to look in more depth, why is the supply limited?
For starters, how about a limited field of experts who are will and able to write a reference book? Especially since their labor can often be put to use in a more financially rewarding manner?
Other limits to supply are the high costs of bringing reference texts to market (manufacturing, shipping, cost of unsold inventory, advertising/marketing, etc). Publishers just aren't willing to operate at a loss (not unlike most companies
Rather than dismissing supply and demand, look deeper at the root causes of limited supply.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Tech books started as an extreme niche market, with well-researched books chock full of useful information. Because of the amount of time and resources that it would take to put a book together (compared to the number of sales over its lifetime), books used to be more expensive.
Somewhere along the way, though, publishers got an idea. If they could fill 300 pages with the literary equivalent of shovelware, they could sell you the book for the same amount of money (since buyers were used to it), but save huge amounts on the research of the title. Thus you ended up with books on VR that did nothing but describe commercial software packages, then in the appendix copy the instructions for a headboom from a far better book. That way they could advertise it as a "build your own VR system!" book, without really doing anything.
This worked so well that publishers got another idea. They could publish even more of these books, and make MORE money! People would still pay it. So they flooded the shelves with whatever was popular at the moment. Be it the Sound Blaster, PERL, Java, XML, LDAP, whatever. It got to the point where if it could be extended from a magazine article, it went to a book form.
And that's how we got to today. If someone can write an entire book on XML DTDs consisting of 30 pages of content, plus 250 pages of source code, manual pages, and descriptions of available parser packages, they will. As a result, the signal to noise ratio is pretty low. If the wannabe programmers would stop buying this crud, we might be able to send a message to the publishers that we want real books. Until then, though, you can only try to sift through the mess of garbage for the good stuff. Check out Bruce Perens' books. I can't vouch for all the content, but at least you can preview them online to see if they're worth the purchase.
Oh, and in case you want to save a tree: Free Online Books (That are worth more than the paper they're printed on.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I wrote a book on shell scripting in 1993 and a book on PHP in 1999, and I made total between the two books about $3,500. I think about spent almost two man years total on the two books. That's about $0.84 per hour. Despite dozens of requests from Simon & Schuster to write another book on various topics, I'm not going through that hassle again. It just isn't worth it. Even though both books were carried by both Borders and B&N, one was translated into five different languages, and they saw better than expected sales for the type of book, it sill isn't worth writing a book at even 20 times the pay.
Proud AC since Oct '98
Reading his screed about fleecing simply tells me just how much slashdotters are out of touch with economics and business. Just because the cost isn't what he wants it to be, doesn't mean there's some kind of grand conspiracy to defraud him. Maybe if more slashdotters started writing books they'd learn why things are the way they are instead of looking to blame others.
When you buy a technical book, you're paying for quite a lot:
Proof reading
Technical review
Project management
Artists and graphic design
Layout for printing
Printing
Shipping
Returns (books are generally sold on a "sale or return" basis)
Authors
Unsuccessful publications
Without all of that you might get a good quality product, in the rare cases where an author has all the necessary skills, but mostly you won't.
Technical books are a niche product. ANY technical book is a financial gamble, because the target audience is (usually) so small. You might sell 10,000 copies if you're lucky, but you might sell none. Poor processes at any stage will guarantee that you'll sell NONE to any given reader again.
From my perspective as an author: all the parties concerned spend a huge amount of time putting a book together - each chapter passes in sequence through a couple of dozen stages, each one of which requires hours of one person's time. Specifically, I earn about 10% for an hour spent working on writing of the money I would earn from my clients doing development.
See Apress.com for their standard contract terms if you want to decide if the fabulous riches of authorship have swayed my opinions. Ho ho.
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
1) Specialized knowledge
2) Limited Market
3) Wealthy consumers
I immagine Doctors have the same problem with their books.
The expectation is that you use the knowledge you gain from using the product/reading the book to go off and make money. Look at the absurd licensing cost of ClearCase, for example -- there is no way that's worth thousands of dollars a seat, but they want a slice of the pie since you're using their software in your development process.
If you havn't tried out Safari.Oreilly.com you really should. 10-20 bucks a month gets you online access to all the Oreilly and Microsoft manuals you need (ok not all, but a good number)
If your library doesn't have a book that you want, try ordering it. If it's approved it'll take a while before they get it. Of course, this depends on your local library.
I know, there are times when you have a project that you have to ramp up for and only a week or so to do it. Then, I guess, you have to go and fork over the money.
Saturday is April 1. Slashdot will be shut down. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Information wants to be $54.95 plus sales tax.
...they aren't necessary anymore. I have not bought a tech book in the past 3 or 4 years, aside from cheap reference manuals that I keep at my desk. I used to buy a tech book every week or so, but then I realized I could get most of the information they contained online, for free. I tend to find more detailed, more applicable, more timely information online.
-William Brendel
I wrote a tech book and chapters of a few others some years back and, by coincidence, worked for a technical publisher in my "day job." These are the factors I see:
1. Tech books are often large, which means they're more expensive to edit, more expensive to lay out, and more expensive to print and ship.
2. The pool of potential authors is very small and could be making more money doing something else. The number of people who have the technical skills to write a book, the writing skills to convey technical information, and the willingness to act like a professional in return for tiny material gain is...well, there's not a lot of people like that. The impression I get is that people writing technical books get better deals than in other sectors of publishing, though it comes down to a pittance and a half rather than just a pittance. Still, that does make it a more expensive deal for the publisher.
3. Even once a manuscript leaves an author's hands, there's additional overhead. There's the additional cost of hiring technical editors to make sure that what the author said is accurate, possibly the cost of licensing arrangements with software publishers, possibly the cost of doing illustrations (which also make the book even longer for its word count, which makes it yet more expensive), and possibly other costs.
4. The market is small. This may be the single biggest factor. You've got relatively large up-front costs and limited possibilities for sales. Even the most successful book on, say, C# or photomanipulation with Gimp just isn't going to be a runaway best-seller on the order of a Harry Potter or Steven King book.
The best example has to be K&R. It's a very slim book, all B&W, hasn't really gone out of date, yet it has always been very expensive.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Almost every company I've worked for (15+ full time and contract) has told me to go buy a book on whatever I'm doing and they'll reimburse me for it, even when it's something simple, or someting so new/complex/specialized that there is no book. If that's typical, I'd guess that publishers are setting price based on what managers are willing to pay, not on what readers are willing to pay.
For the same reason that business class flights are expensive. The majority of these are paid for by companies who don't care *that* much about whether a book costs 20 bucks or 80 - and this makes sense, too, since even if it only saves a few man-hours in the end, those few man-hours probably would've cost more than the 80 bucks the company shelled out for the book.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
You are absolutely correct that the books on concepts and fundamentals are still useful after years. So there is no reason why those cannot be produced in hardback and sold for less than they are right now.
So why not make the books on the latest, unstable API into a 3-ring binder-type? Then, every year, you can purchase the updates to it.
Yeah, I know. There's nothing to stop someone from just photocopying the original book and the updates. On the other hand, the printing costs would be far less so it would be easier for the printing company to turn a profit.
80% (statistic I pulled out of my butt) of the material in a PHP4 intro book will be the same as the material in a PHP5 intro book which will be the same as the material in a PHP6 intro book. Yet you will pay the same price for the book each time.
I also believe that most books in school courses should be packaged this way.
I'm with you on the 'short shelf life' of technical books -- but that should be reasons for the bookstores to try for a higher turnover. Who wants to pick up that book on HTML+, when there's a book about XHTML 2.0 (nevermind that the spec is still in draft, and there's little if any browser support).
But sitting on the shelf you years is the absolutely worst thing that can happen to something in a store -- shelf space costs money. That's how Amazon can undercut prices while still making a profit -- they don't have a store that's 1/2 full of stuff that's not selling ... they make profit by turning stuff over, not letting it collect dust.
Yes, there are places out there that are reminiscent of 'Black Books', but it's not nearly as profitable as actually selling things.
I personally don't, but if there's someone out there who's forced to support Win95 because his boss refuses to switch, he's going to want the book. I've had to support quite a few outdated OSes because of management decisions (yay, Netscape 3.0g on Solaris 2.5! ... in 2003), and found that Amazon Marketplace and eBay to be great places to pick up reference materials after the typical bookstore has stopped carrying them, assuming there isn't a market. And unfortunately, I don't work down the street from Reiter's any more.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
They don't sell the same volume as a Dan Brown or RK Rowling novel.
When you consider how many books those author's sell, then ask yourself by those books are so expensive.
They are also reference manuals, sources of information intended to support your work, which they largely assume your being paid to do. Buying a book on SQL or PHP or C++ programming is expensive because they consider these to be books used by professionals to make money. They don't consider these books to be bought by hobbyists having a passing interest in these technologies. The books predominantly are purchased by paid professionals seeking solutions and answers to products they intend to make a profit off of, or get paid to develop.
There is also a certain mentality that there are people willing to pay $80 for a C++ reference manual, and I would suggest, there are lots of people that can't think on their own unless their ideas and education can be supported by a large reference library.
I learn by doing. I learned PHP and MySQL by actually developing a website, throwing myself into the thick of it using only online reference manuals. Granted, it may not be the greatest website on the planet, but I learned how to implement a message board and dynamic content and advertising simply by doing it, not reading about it in a book. These book authors don't make money of competent individuals that can learn and explore new ideas on their own, they make their money off the people that feel it necessary to read about something for weeks before actually touching a computer. I found that usually picking up a book about mySQL or PHP AFTER doing my website, most of the books offer few new insights into using these technologies.
If you think that these books are too expensive, realize there is a slew of free resources on the web at your finger tips. Largely, these books simply collect that information and consolidate it into a single source. If you have any programming experience, then you shouldn't need to buy a book about any other scripting or programming language, you already know the basic concepts and premises, you just need to understand the syntax, which you can find from countless online resources. If its not based on a programming language, such as learning how to use Windows 2003 server or Apache, etc. Try and learn about these technologies on your own by setting up your own server and using the web as a reference.
If you still find you can't learn enough on your own, using the web as your guide, then you will at least learn to appreciate that buying a book, even an expensive one, is a better aid for you to learn new technologies. But I think you will find that learning by doing, rather then reading, is both inexpensive and more enjoyable in the long run.
Finally, if your working for an employer that demands you setup a PHP server and develop a website next week, then get them to pay for the books if you have no experience. These book author's also assume that these books are paid for by employer's to enhance the skills and experience of their employees, and anything sold to businesses is generally more expensive then to individuals.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Of course there's the supply and demand argument, but there is also opportunity cost, that area of economics that states we need to be compensated for giving up something. A highly skilled technical person could become a consultant and earn lots of money. Or he could spend his time putting his knowledge in a book. He's going to have to be compensated for it some how.
And secondly, as a few others have mentioned, tech books go out of date fast, so there's the cost to keep the operation going.
My father works in religious publishing; why are his books so cheap when supply and demand should be equivalent to technical literature? Because opportunity cost is low for preachers (most tend to be poor) and notions of a deity rarely change over time.
..."Limited audience", high cost of publishing, and "ROI" stuff. For volatile subject matter, it makes some sense. My Windows 2000 MCSE books cost like $60 each, but they're large hardcover books with a useful life of maybe 2 years. Any left over are going to be like two year old calendars. Essentially no value, even on the discount table.
But "The C programming language", written in 1978, and (according to Amazon) last updated in 1998, is a 274 page paperback. It has, no doubt, sold THOUSANDS (millions?) of copies over the years, and easily paid off it's production and update costs.
But Amazon is still charging $44.20 for it. I wonder how much Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie get out of it.
This is just plain greed on the part of the publisher. They charge what they can get, partly because they know it's usually employers that buy the books and write them off, or students who have no choice.
You could also take Homer Simpson's answer "Because they're stupid. That's why everyone does everything".
postmodernsideshow.com
As you surmised, it's just because people keep paying the high prices - not surprising when the target audience are businesses and individuals in a fairly lucrative profession.
I know it doesn't give you the instant satisfaction, but this place has good prices.
http://www.bookpool.com/
I don't work there.
My experience has been that boo at Barnes and Noble are quite a bit more expensivewhen compared to their e-store counterparts. I use Barnes and Noble to scout out what books I want to get, and then go look at Bookpool, Orielly, Amazon, and even *gasp* eBay.
I don't think I should have to pay the cover price of a book if I can help it.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
I'm getting just the information I was looking for here. Thanks for that. So a number of causes have been identified. Among those, niche markets, high publishing costs, short shelf lives, and last but not least, an unattractive market for writers due to length of time and effort vs. low rate of return. So, what are some suggestions for fixing this? Publishing online to eliminate paper costs? Perhaps advertisements in the books to help offset some of these costs, or to supplement writer income? What do you think should be done?
Because teenage pranks are fun when you're about to die!
Where do I get them free in hardcopy form? Wikipedia has pointers to PDF versions at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_assembly_language , but those sure aren't as useful as hardcopy (at least not without a second monitor to read them on).
-insert a witty something-
Not in 2006
Not in 1995.
I will not eat green eggs and ham,
Sam i am.
Yes I know how, Dr. Seuss, story ended...
But this is reality.
In reality more is charged to give a false sense value. Not so much to the book, but to its subject.
Technical books, by their very nature, will never sell as many copies as, say, Harry Potter novels, or Terry Pratchett's Discworld or Jean M. Auel's caveman porn series.
The audience for technical books is essentially captive. They often have no choice except to buy that particular book -- perhaps because it is required reading for a course, or perhaps because it is the only authoritative reference on a subject.
And, yes, to some greater or lesser extent it's because we've shown willing to pay high prices in the past. The extent of the power which individuals may have over this, however, is questionable; since many of these books are going to be bought by businesses, libraries and other institutions.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Worse yet, the book was structured with an extended example. The code for this example was maybe 30 pages long the first time through. The second repetition had all the first 30 pages repeated with another 20 pages or so of added material and a few minor modifications. The third repetition repeated all of the second one with more added material and a few minor modifications. If I remember correctly (and I may not) there were SIX repetitions of the code and the final one was about 100 pages long and repeated most of the code from the fifth repetition with some added material and a few minor modifications.
Out of about 750 pages, about half were the extended example. Which didn't do much even in the final version. And with generally poor quality code.
But even at that it was better than many of the books available today.
Of course, what happened was companies just switched to year-at-a-time inventories. This has meant that anything highly specialized, whether power tools or technical books, has become ridiculously rare and expensive. That was when technical book prices shot up in price, and when their print runs dropped to infinitesimal most of the time.
Congress, of course, can change the law anytime it wants to.
I've had experience in publishing and I will say that it's not just supply and demand - though that is certainly a part of it. A lot of it is looking at what the bigger companies are doing, what is acceptable, how to make the book appealing (which sometimes involves lowering the price, but actually, there is a trend in which people don't have as high expectations of cheaper books, believe it or not). Also, as far as tech books go, they need to be reviewed by people not at the publishing company - professors, people in the field, etc, and those people need to be paid. So does production, so do the editors, so do the marketers, then we need money for the marketers to use to market the book, so on and so forth. There tends to be a spike in sales when a book hits the market, and then after that it drops off quite a bit. You'd be surprised: publishers aren't raking in as much money as you might expect from these books. It costs a lot to produce them even when you print cheap.
Higher prices promote quality. If tech writing was more rewarding, we'd have more and better people doing it.
Bookstores are filled with first-to-market buzzword dreck precisely because suckers will buy the first thing they can get their hands on, in the vain hope that it will hold their hand in learning some new technology. An ignorant consumer will buy whatever is cheapest.
Which are basically a type of technical book. I understand programming books, because as people have said, they are very niche, and will only be useful for so long (languages get old and out of date). But why am I still spending $140 for a math or science book that is in it's 5th or 6th edition, and has only had a few modifications over the past couple editions (I've compared)? I would assume by now they have well payed for the development costs of the initial writing....
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Some publishers also only care about being first on the shelf with a title. (I know this from personal experience.) So they do whatever it takes to get there first, but then move on to the next title. So they never print that many.
Other publishers print a gazillion, and write off the rest in taxes and selling them cheaply to someone who sells them at deep discounts.
In both cases, it's an abuse of the concept of producing the right volume to get the price lower.
And don't forget that rewrites (2nd editions, etc) cost them a lot in overhead as well.
O'Reilly is an example of a sane publisher. They care about the subjects, they care about the authors, they care about the readers, they care about the publishing industry, they care about their pocketbooks. Far too many publishers only care a bout a subset of these, and in some cases it's only the very last item on the list.
I've worked with O'Reilly in the past, but have no vested interest in them. I have also been published by another company, and my experience with them was disheartening.
There's ONE thing your argument leaves out. All the advantages print has over screen.
New editions cost nearly as much as original editions. The author has to go through the whole book and decide what should and shouldn't be changed, the entire book has to do a pass by the editor to make sure it all still makes sense, and printing the book doesn't cost any less (in fact, it probably costs a lot more). Certainly, the original writing has been long since paid off, and the editor probably has to do less work on later editions than the first one, but new editions incur new costs, which must be paid off as well.
The system is designed primarily to keep publishers in business. Books are priced to do that and to compete with any competitors. After all, there are many publishers who write competing books on say, C++ or SQL.
Every now and then someone new jumps into the game (O'Reilley years ago, Apress more recently) and produce books at lower margin. But there is a fixed size market ("pie") and the only way to capture a segment of that market is to write superior books (difficult) or to lower production costs (also hard) and squeeze out other publishers. So publishers love anything *new* that has no existing publications or that obsolesces standards: e.g., the .NET languages, the W3C's WS-* stack, and revisions of the Java language, since such situations create a "bigger pie".
I've been involved for publishing for some years now, having written books of my own, edited for O'Reilly, and now I am with Apress. I don't know it all, but I do have some experience with publishing economics. The cost of paper and printing (i.e., the cost of the physical book) is fairly inconsequential in the overall scheme of things. A 500 or so page book like my Oracle SQL*Plus: The Definitive Guide probably costs in the neighborhood of USD 3.00 per copy to print and bind.
:-).
So it's not the cost of the paper
What drives prices is the need to make a profit and pay all the people involved. All the editorial, production, and marketing costs must be borne by the quantity of a given book that a publisher expects to sell over that book's lifetime, and that quantity is often quite low. Sales projections of less than 20,000 units over a three year period are quite common, and many books will never even break the 10,000 unit mark. The high pricing that you see, and reader's willingness to pay it, is what allows many tech books to even exist.
In the end, it does all boil down to supply and demand. The smaller a given market is, the higher the share of cost each customer must bear.
And that SQL*Plus book I mentioned earlier? The second edition released in November 2004. Since then it has sold 1060 units, making me a total of $2883.91. In hindsight, it wasn't worth the effort to produce the second edition. I've had other books do better though, and in the long run the averages work out well enough that I'm happy (given that writing is supplemental income, and not my primary source). Publishers play the averages too. Some books will break out and be very profitable. Most will not. It is rarely easy to determine which is which until after the fact.
As an example: If the overhead cost at a publishing house is $10,000 to be ready to start printing, Book A will have an added cost of 10 cents. Book B will have an added cost of 10 dollars. This is for everytime the book is reprinted. Publishers try not to sell books at a loss, and neither do book stores.
So when you ask yourself how many tech books sold this month- You stated in the parent: Why? These books are standards and needed by everyone. They should be able to capitalize off the popularity by lowering the price. Surely it doesn't take $120 to make Mitchell's Machine Learning--it's such a tiny book!. Your correct statement would be: These are books needed by all Computer Science Majors/programmers. After stating it that way you cut down on a lot of the potential market. The number of people who graduated from college in the US is 23.8%. From there you can weed out the anyone who didn't take a programming class (Art, Business, Literature, History, Medicine, Fashion Design, Dance, Social Policy, Accounting, Politics, etc). After that weed out the ones who took one or two programming courses because it was required for their major (Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Architecture, Areonautical Engineering, Physics, Bio-Engineering, Structural Engineering, etc). From there, there is maybe one in one thousand people who are potential customers for that book. With a US population of 295 Million people, that would give you 295,000 potental customers. Remove anyone who already has a copy of the book, buys one used, or has a similar book and doesn't feel like buying another AI book you chop the market down quite sharply. I haven't purchased many tech books since I graduated from college (a couple of references for the FE/EIT). Those books have still served me quite well. So back to the point above: Book A sells 100,000 copies in the first month, with continuing sales for the next couple of years so a large initial print run is justified. Book B may sell 5,000 per semester. Which is going to cost more to print, store and sell?
An interesting reference on selling books from Publishers Marketing Association. It may answer some of your questions. Their estimate is that you reach between 0.01% and 10% of your potential market with a given book.
Side note:
Once you see books being sold for $5-$10 in the bargain bin, those books aren't being sold at cost, they are being sold below cost to get them out the door because they are taking up sales space that other (money making) books could be using.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
I was recently looking through Amazon for SQL books, and picked out 5 to get. I stumbled acress bookpool by accident, but the prices were so much lower than Amazon, that I could get overnight shipping and still save $20 .
As for why they are more expensive than, say, the latest Xanth novel or Pilates workout book, others have already said. Fewer buyers to pay for the writer's (and publishers) income.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.
"Especially now that Print On Demand technology enables the publisher to do single-copy hardback press runs, keep the retail price below fifty bucks and still make a profit. The tech publishers are just screwing you."
Yeah! Go download it off of Usenet. That'll teach them not to screw you. *whap* *whap* *whap* Revenge is best served...over P2P.
I don't know of any business that charges less than they could for their product....
...most big businesses do. They ride the elasticity curve to maximize their overall profit (or sometimes revenue or even penetration). The nature of the curve is such that if you are selling 100,000 units at $20, then you could sell some smaller number (let's say 25,000) at $30.
You generally only see "all the traffic will bear" pricing when demand really exceeds capacity.
Apologies in advance if this is overly pedantic.
after all, many novels never sell near as much as Brown or Rowling, yet the books cost less per page than tech books.
I suppose a mix of technical editing costs and "because we can!" are the real reasons.
As you get older, you start to see the flaws in the writing and how much of it is just the same, re-hashed, material. Different names for the characters, countries, etc, but the same characters travelling the same country and completing the same quest to defeat the same bad guy.
Tech books suffer the same limitations in the 80% statistic. 80% of the material is the same as the material in the previous version which will be the same as the material in the next version.
With fiction, there's really not much that can be done with that. It's all up to the author to re-write the same old material in a way that will appeal to you.
In tech books, why bother re-writing it at all? Write it once and then publish updates.
I also have cut back on my purchase of fiction books. Although I'm buying more total books now, they're almost completely non-fiction. The only fiction I buy is, like you, from series I like by authors I like. I've also given away most of my fiction collection. I believe that the average fiction book is written to the 15-25 year old market.
Technology books are different than any other books. Most books can be published and printed, and if they don't sell right away, they can always remain on the shelf until they sell, even after publications of it stop, someone will eventually want that murder mystery. Tech books however, have a shelf life. If it is a book on Windows '95 (for example), it is only as good as long as windows '95 is popular, or around.
;)
So, I have always convinced myself that it is the short life of the necessity of these books that have caused them to be so expensive. Then I ask myself why I would want a book that will be worthless in 3 years time on my bookshelf? My answer was, "I don't", and "that's what libraries are for"
I have talked with publishers about this...as an author. I want to know what their take was, and suprisingly one publisher was very willing to talk about it.
Average book costs are about $60-$80k.
At $40 a book, this is 1500-2000 books just to break even on the publication of the book.
However, publishers must pay large B&N companies bribes to get the book face out on the shelf and also more to put the book on the end side of a shelf.
Plus, publishers must take back any unsold books.
Plus, publishers have to pay their staff and advertising costs.
An author will get a few hundred to few thousand dollar upfront check. Most of the time that money is a forward of expected royalties that are around 10-20% depending on who you are and what you are writing. Take home ends up being about $2000-$10000 per book. If more are sold, then good. If not, then bad. Plus, authors works are often pooled, which means a bad book takes money away from a good book.
Of all the publishers I have written for, Syngress was the best because they were honest and actually market the books. The others don't really do ANYTHING to advertise...there is no money for that unless the author is well known. Typically, authors will publisize their own works.
$40 is not much for a book. You should try looking at religious works that can run upward of $300 or more.
And, use Safari...it is the best deal of all.
Smaller Target Audience
The simple answer is high demand and low supply. But a closer look reveals that this isn't necessarily the case. Supply is actually very high, and the market nearly saturated. And while demand for tech books as a whole if very high, demand for any particular book is quite low (unless it's one of those few notable titles). It doesn't seem as if the tech book market is following the laws of supply and demand.
Actually it is. The problem is the people keep trying to compare it to the non-tech book markets. You cannot compare the market forces of "Learn Python on Two Euros a Day" to the market forces of "Murder on the Bullet Train" The tech book market is a *boutique* market. The consumers are highly selective, and willing to pay a premium for the right book. Which is good, because most tech titles don't sell well, so the margin on them is quite small. If the willingness to pay high prices weren't there, you would see lower prices, but you would also see a lot fewer titles.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
BadAnalogyGuy = BadClicheGuy ???
The biggest ripoffs, IMO, aren't tech books, they're textbooks. Unlike a book on Linux, a book on calculus doesn't become obsolete in 3 years. However, the publishers bring out a new calculus book every 2-3 years purely in order to kill off the used book market.
You might also be surprised how little margin there can be for the publisher in a relatively expensive book. Producing books in color (like most textbooks) is actually pretty expensive. Also, because the cost of printing is almost all setup costs, you have to print a lot of copies at once, and you then have a huge inventory you've already paid for, and that hasn't yet brought in any revenue. You have to wait a long time to see if you sell all the copies, and even if you manage to sell them all to book stores, later on the stores will return copies that have been on the shelf for a certain amount of time, so your profit can evaporate before your eyes. In the world of college textbooks, marketing is also a huge cost. It's like beer, or soda pop: the most popular products tend to be very uniform, and the sellers believe that the only way to get a competitive advantage is with expensive marketing. When you buy a six-pack of Budweiser for $6, roughly $0.01 of that is the cost of brewing it; the rest is all marketing.
Print on demand technology is finally (after years of being vaporware) becoming a viable alternative, and I've had excellent experiences with lulu.com, for example. That could change a lot of things, but a huge, mature industry isn't going to change overnight.
Find free books.
A number of posters have mentioned that college textbook pricing is generally ridiculous in a number of fields. One thing I haven't seen mentioned: has anyone wandered over to the selection of textbooks for business classes? I am not a business major and, fortunately, I have never had to buy one of these books. Most of these books are quite expensive, more than most tech books, I think. And what is in them? Marketing, mostly. The little bit of skimming through these books to see what justifies the price has shown me that many of them are (collections of) ads, thinly or thickly disguised. I would assume that, to get business professors to write these books, the publishers would have to pay a handsome sum. After all, if these business professors are any good at what they do, they are commanding a large salary from their universities plus making money continually on business opportunities, and it needs to be worth their time to write the books. It stands to reason that these writers would also see writing the books as a business opportunity to promote that with which they are affiliated. Publishers could hardly object (even if they wished) because it gets the books written. But what do the students actually learn from the books? Some tech books seem to fall into this vein as well, "advertising" a particular product or technology to the author's or publisher's benefit.
Another consideration for the price of tech books is that up-to-date university engineering libraries buy lots of them. The engineering library here has a huge selection of books and is very good about keeping the collection up to date. It's expensive, but they have the budget to be able to keep buying these books. Most (not all) of the technology books seem to be of some quality. $40-$60 for a book for this collection does not stop the library from procuring more.
Finally, for buying books, http://isbn.nu/ (a shopbot) might save some time in comparison.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Tech books dont have a long lifespan, most tech books are considered out of date by the time they are 4yrs old.
Sing: One of these things is not like the other, one of these things is wrong:
Non-copyright softcover book by famous author $4.95 ($AU)
Non-copyright leather bound book by famous author $9.95 ($AU)
Copyright hardcover book by famous author $49.95 - $59.95 ($AU)
Of course there is more to it than the simple fact of copyright, but copyright is the root cause of many problems in the publishing industry (the least being price). IMHO authors should be able to make money from their work (providing it is good enough) but I don't agree with the current copyright laws.
Posted anon for obvious reasons
Disagree: technical editing not expensive
I've done some technical editing; the most lucrative of my gigs was for Prentice Hall on a UNIX Internals book, and other than a "thanks" in the book, I got a couple hundred dollars as an "honorarium" - basically, a small token amount. Other books, I've pretty much done for even less, mostly because I've thought that the boks needed written, or needed to be out there.
For the technical books I've been involved in, the publisher's overhead for technical editing has always been practically nothing. From talking to other people who've done the same, it's pretty clear to me that of all the pieces of a technical book, the technical editing is pennies compared to anything else.
The *primary* reason that more books aren't written, at least for me, is that my last several employers demanded editorial control, if the book was going to talk about anything related to current or potential future business of the company. One even demanded that I not list myself as an author on the book, to prevent people from trying to hire me away because of the book. Add to that that the minimum amount of effor you can expect to spend is ~2080 hours (one man year), and you have a sterling recipe for "it's not worth it".
-- Terry
books are them things made outta paper right? I heard about them in computer class.
There are 10 types of people in the world; those who can read binary, and those who can't.
On the other hand, when I was in India, I found a couple of bookshops in Connaught Place (Delhi) that had a stack of local imprints of O'Reilly books sold for the SE Asian market. Locally printed, I agree paper was a bit thinner and print quality was a bit lower (not that much). But the same text, and hey, I'm not worried if code samples are in black and white.
Check out the computer shops next time you're in India. Even allowing for sea mail postage back home buying a dozen O'Reilly's still came out at only about 20% of the cost back home. Nice little present at the end of the holiday!
I use the Safari bookshelf to read these books virtually on-line. It's relatively inexpensive and when I really get stuck with a problem I can find the answer very quickly.
I buy all my tech books from BookPool.
I can't remember the last time I paid for a tech book. OTOH, my two previous employers spent about $100/year on tech books for me. Whether or not they knew it is another matter. And paying ridiculous prices for tech books is a lot easier when it's somebody else's money.
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
Two years ago I took a class at DeVry. A required tech reference was online, ($155.00 user registration//no buyback). Not used by instructor. All that bought the user registration could not sell it back and useless to subsequent classes.
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
I was reading somewhere that getting 5k to 10k books sold is a *good* run for tech books.
After that, it's easy to do the math.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
You are confusing math and science books with textbooks.
Textbook prices for all subjects are quite high. The reason is fairly simple: the guy who chooses the book (the professor, the TA, the instructor) isn't the guy who pays for it (the student, the parents, the scholarship administrator). Thus, there is absolutely no pressure to pick a $10 textbook (yes, I've had a college math class with a $10 textbook) over a $150 one, even if they have pretty much the same content. After a while, this leads to a general elevation of prices. It's the same reason why medical costs are spiraling out of control...
On the other hand, math and science books targeted towards actual professionals tend to be cheap. Most of the books I used in my graduate classes were free (a pdf file) or under $40 (dead tree form).
I generally wait for a few weeks after the book is published and buy it from used books from amazon. most time I got lucky to get good books really cheap.
So why is the K&R "C" book $48.00?
There sure have been plenty printed.