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

Perhaps you don't realise what you're paying for.

[MythMoth]

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.

Size of market, supply, demand

[jgennick]

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.