Quote:
Originally Posted by sanders
I am about to publish a non-fiction book (a computer programming manual) and I'm considering an ebook version of it as well.
A few things to note (which most of you probably alreay know): the printing/paper costs are not the bulk of the price you pay for a book in the store. The store usually gets books from the publisher at a "deep discount" of 55% (and can even return unsold books to the publisher for a refund). Out of the remaining 45%, the publisher pays the author, the editor, the printer, the cover designer, etc. A 300-page book in large numbers costs only a dollar or two to print.
Using print-on-demand and a short discount of, say, 30%, I incur higher printing fees (about $4 for a 300-page book) but no stocking costs; in the end, this leads to higher net per book (say, about $10 for a $22.99 book).
However, ebooks do not need to be stored in brick-and-mortar stores. I could publish the pbook and offer the ebook for download from my own site, at the same price I would get for the pbook; yet the consensus on this forum seems to be that an ebook should only cost a few dollars, tops. Include the risk that an entire class of students will buy one single copy of my ebook and put the pdf on their Iliads, and this makes me hesitant to go that route. Especially for technical/textbook material, the "share copies of the PDF" problem sounds like a real risk.
Can you say anything to convince me? :-)
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If you do decide to use Adobe PDF as your ebook format, then you do deserve to get pirated all to heck. That is a very poor format for portable readers. However what you could do is publish the pbook with a companion CD that contains all the programming examples. That would make it a lot easier overall for the reader of the book.
The issue here is should you publish an ebook and the answer is no. The reason for that is because there are no decent portable readers that are yet good enough for text books. if I was using your book, I would want it in paper form so I could sit in front of the computer and use it while I was learning how to program from it. It's not all that nice to have to flip back and forth between the book and the editor. So while it is possible some might distribute the ebook, those really serious about learning from your book would want the paper edition. That that just collect to say they have it would steal the ebook, but would not really use it, so it would not matter that they have it.