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

[Alex P Keaton in da]

There is a limited market, so printing and inventory are expensive (especially with actual stores) and also, the books expire quickly. You can get old tech books cheap. I bought a book on Photoshop CS2, it was $60. The same book on PhotoShop 7 was $12. With tech books you have to sell as much as you can before they expire.
And keep in mind, things are worth what people are willing to pay. If no one will pay more than $10 for a Ferrari, your Ferrari is worth $10. If someone is willing to pay $100,000.00 for your 88 Civic, your 88 Civic is worth 100K. I don't know of any business that charges less than they could for their product.... (Loss leaders etc are a marketing strategy....)

Re:Sales

[Eric Giguere]

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.

Absolutely. It's a lot of work for essentially nothing more than whatever advance you can negotiate from the publisher. Typical advances for a computer trade book (non-textbook) are in the $8K-$10K range. That is often the only money the author ever sees. Why? Consider the economics. The normal royalty rate is 10% of the net (wholesale) price of the book. Say the book retails for $50 and the bookseller pays 60% of that to the publisher, i.e. $30. So the author gets $3 for each copy sold. But they won't see any money from the publisher until the advance is earned out, which means the publisher has to sell 3334 copies before the author sees another dime. (This is assuming all sales are in the US, since foreign sales usually have a lower royalty rate.)

Now you may be thinking that 3334 copies is not a big deal to do, but it actually is for many tech topics, especially for books tied to specific versions of software or so on.

Plus there are other oddities in publishing that conspire to make the author less money, such as the fact that bookstores can return unsold books back to the publisher for full credit, which means the publisher always keeps some of the money it's earmarked to pay the author "in reserve" in order to account for any returned copies. And the fact that publishers have long accounting cycles, which means it's not unusual to receive payment 6 months to 1 year after a quarter for the books sold in that quarter (assuming you've earned out your advance).

Please don't be fooled into thinking that authors are raking in the big bucks on these books. Yes, obviously some authors do make a lot of money, but they're the exception. Writing books can be fun, but you don't do it to get rich.

Eric
My own self-publishing experiement will be out soon

Some Classic Examples

[eldavojohn]

I believe the problem with tech books is that they are books of ideas. They are pure raw ideas and usually can lead the way to making a lot of money.

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:

• Tom Mitchell's Machine Learning
• Duda, Hardt & Stork's Pattern Classification
• Russell & Norvig's AI: A Modern Approach (the book that every AI teacher uses)

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.

Re:Some Classic Examples

[Goo.cc]

"A friend who worked at B&N"

I work part time at a B&N (to fund my computer habit) and it does indeed happen a lot with computer books. My returns are frequently MSCE, C#, and Java books.

On the flip side, it is nice to help and talk to people who are looking for information on Linux and Mac OS X. Sadly, they are outnumbered 1000 to 1 by the Oprah zombies.

Re:Some Classic Examples

[qengho]

Surely it doesn't take $120 to make Mitchell's Machine Learning--it's such a tiny book!

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.

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.)

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.

Why do they charge this much for books?

[Anne_Nonymous]

Information wants to be $54.95 plus sales tax.

No money in it

[Elvis Parsley]

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.

Why not a fundamental change?

[khasim]

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.

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.