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?"

They're not too expensive from the author's point

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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 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.

Simple

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

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.

Re:Allow me to explain

[Dan Ost]

If a book is well organized and clearly written, then I'm perfectly willing to pay $30-$60 for it even if the content is freely available online. Books have indexes. A well-written book with a good index is vastly superior to a Google search anyday.

Also, if I can hand someone a good book and say "read chapter 4, come back if you still need help", then it's worth the $30-$60 I paid for the book (even better if it's a book that the company reimbursed me for). I don't mind helping people (in fact, I rather enjoy it), but a good book will do a better job teaching the basic stuff than I am capable of and once they know the basic stuff, it's easier to help them with the advanced stuff since they already know the vocabulary.

Thor Power Tools

[Anonymous Coward]

The main reason technical books are so expensive is due to a Supreme Court ruling in 1979, Thor Power Tools vs the IRS. Basically, the IRS held that the long standing practice of counting inventory as an asset when it sold was a form of tax evasion. They wanted companies to pay tax on all their inventory, every year it was sitting in the warehouse. The IRS prevailed.

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.

Re:Okay, I can buy all this....

[DaveV1.0]

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?

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.