Why Are Tech Books So Expensive? 149
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?"
Some Classic Examples (Score:5, Informative)
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.
No money in it (Score:5, Informative)
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.
employers often pay (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Some Classic Examples (Score:5, Informative)
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 [xlibris.com] 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.
Re:Sales (Score:4, Informative)
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:Two words, Safari. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sales (Score:5, Informative)
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.
EricMy own self-publishing experiement [uncommonadsense.com] will be out soon