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.

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...

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.)

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.