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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.
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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.
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
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
Information wants to be $54.95 plus sales tax.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I found a copy for US$2 at a user book store. :-)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
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.
Yes, you click on a word in the index, and it takes you to the spot in the book it references. About the only problem I have with safari is it doesn't include the CDROMs. Though it does make an effort in almost all its books to link any freely available downloads that would be on the CDROM.
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.
Of course, the publisher could be offsetting their losses on those other books. You know, the ones that sold 1000 copies before they went obsolete, or were part of the latest fad that lasted for 2 years or less, or were only of interest to a small subset of people.
The question is, would you be willing to pay less if it meant that fewer books on fewer topics get published? What books would you, and the rest of the community be willing to see go away?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
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.