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?"

Comments

Sales

[duerra]

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.

Re:Sales

[MythMoth]

One of the things that he stressed is that there is no money in writing books - you do it essentially for the love

I sort of agree. Tech writing takes a phenomenal amount of time, and the pay is absolutely miniscule. I never expect to make money out of writing compared to my normal contract work.

But - I don't write purely for the "love" (though it is a massive hit when you first hold a bound copy of a real honest-to-god book that you wrote yourself), but rather for the benefits of being a published author.

It's great for your CV, it gives you something easy to talk about in interviews, it is surprisingly respected by co-workers, and if you've done a half-decent job of it, you will be contacted by people seeking an expert in the field.

Your friend may well write for the love of it, but I suspect most tech authors, while not mercenaries by any means, are writing for some of the intangible benefits. Which is all to the good - if you're putting your reputation AND your opportunities on the line, you try damn hard to make a good job of it.

Re:Sales

[mellon]

You got it. When Ralph and I wrote the DHCP handbook, we probably put two man-months each into the book. The editors spent a week or two on it, and then there was the marketing effort, which costs real money. In the end, the book cost a lot of money to make, and didn't sell that many copies.

One interesting factoid: the publisher doesn't care whether you go hardcover or paperback - the cost is effectively the same to them. So you can see that the cost isn't in the printing. This is why the ebook isn't any cheaper. The reason that tech books cost more than science fiction books is very simply that the non-recurring costs are amortized over fewer books. (BTW, when you get into the world of mass market paperbacks, the recurring costs start to swallow the non-recurring costs, and that's why a science fiction paperback has the potential to be cheaper than a hardcover.)

If you want to ask a really good question about book publishing, ask this one: why are *textbooks* so goddamned expensive? I mean, every kid in the country has to have one, right? (TBH, I suspect that there's a pretty good explanation for this also - I just don't know what it is.)

Re:Sales

[Proteus Child]

Give them to Goodwill or the Salvation army and get a tax deduction on them.

three little letters

[way2trivial]

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...

Re:three little letters

[AKAImBatman]

tech books have small audiences, and a short shelf life.

Yet this shouldn't be the case. Books on advanced data structures, OS Design, compiler theory, CPU architectures, language introductions, 3D Graphics theory, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Machine Design, File System Design, etc, etc, etc, can sit on the shelf for YEARS. There's no inherent reason why computer books are so transient other than the fact that wanna-be programmers want a book on every little, unstable API in existence.

Why do they want books on these subjects? Because they skip learning the basics, then they try to skip learning how to read documentation and standards. All of which means their heads are filling with marketing mush rather than useful information on how to design computer programs. ("Reading the W3C standards is too hard. Whaa!" Be a man/woman, suck it up, and figure it out! You'll get a lot more out of a few hours with the standards than you'll get out of hundreds of hours with fluffy books.)

You have to ask yourself, do you have the FREE manuals for the x86 and AMD64 architectures sitting on your bookshelf? (Other architectures count too, but their documentation isn't usually free.) Have you read them? Why not? The information these books contain can help you understand exactly what your processor is doing, even at the 50,000 ft level of Java or Visual Basic.

So if you find yourself with loads of books on outdated materials, but very few (or none) books on timeless basics, throw away your collection and start looking up the stuff you really need.

They aren't

[BadAnalogyGuy]

If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance.

Allow me to explain

[AKAImBatman]

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.)

Re:Okay, I can buy all this....

[Elvis Parsley]

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.

Probably. Of course, there was no way of knowing that it would have sold that long or that much when it was initially published.

This is just plain greed on the part of the publisher.

Or maybe it's just making money where they can. There's this one book which has sold well. That's great. But for that book, there are probably four or five others which just broke even or made a small profit and a lot more which lost money. Publishing is a gamble. Publishers put out lots of books in hopes that some of them will make it. Most don't. The few that do make the difference between more books and going out of business.

Re:Why not a fundamental change?

[AKAImBatman]

If publishers would use more digital tools, this wouldn't be a problem. Using tags to identify indexes can allow a computer to precisely compute the page location of modified material. Run it through a layout program configured with the settings for the book, and you can have a professionally done work all ready for POD printing within a few minutes of making the modifications.

This is exactly the type of stuff that technology was designed to solve. The fact that everyone still writes technical books in Microsoft Word so that they can be later laid out by hand is just shocking.