Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
For technical books, that pricing may not be ridiculous.
All of these costs occur before the book is turned into a PDF file that can be sent to a printer as input to the imagesetter that will generated the plates the book is printed from. How much the book is priced at will be determined by what it costs to produce, and how many copies the publisher expects to sell.
Technical books are by nature expensive. They are costly to produce, go out of date quickly, and appeal to a relatively limited market.
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That may be how the publisher determines the suggested retail price, but the market determines actual selling price. And what I think is going on is that these publishers still don't get e-book pricing. Lots of wishful thinking going on.
Prices will either be set at something reasonable- which is probably less than $10 per book, or people won't buy it. Or they will pirate it- tech books are widely distributed on the newsgroups and the web.
Cluelessness abounds in today's publishing industry when it comes to e-book pricing. Some of the stuff is just ridiculous- last year I paid $65 or so for a print copy of 'Mac OSX Internals.' Big heavy book- wanted a copy I could read online. A month or so later, the company released a pdf copy. Was it free for me since I bought the book? No- they wanted $45 for the pdf (I called about this). So, I grabbed a pirated copy, which is within my rights, according to US laws.
Talk all you want about morality and the poor publishing industry, but look at this market pragmatically- few people will buy overpriced e-books, even if the publishers whine about their costs.