kmhess writes “In case you didn’t know, computer books are usually really big paperback books with information about a specific technical topic that cost around $50, and become obsolete faster than the technology.
With the recent postings regarding how libraries are ‘stealing’ from authors, I’d recommend reading The myth and truth of computer book publishing. For that $50 book, if it sells 5000 copies, $250k total revenue, the author gets about $10k.
…[O]nly 20% of the total revenue is spent on actually producing the book. The breakdown is 9% for the physical printing, 6% for editorial and design and a mere 5% for the author…Book publishing is one of the industries that the distribution and marketing of the goods (65% of the revenue) is much more expensive than the production of the goods (20% of the revenue)
So that $50 Java 1.2 book I finally threw away I could have bought directly from the author for $2.50. Grr…”
No kiddin’…
Last time I was at Borders and browsed the computer books, it amazed me with how much you pay for so little.
I’m getting my feet wet with MySQL and PHP programming and wanted a decent book on using these in websites. I found a couple books that looked good, but dammit, I ain’t paying $50 for a 250 page book.
Someone really should inform these publishers that there’s this thing called the internet. And part of the internet is this thing called the web. And on this web one finds free tutorials on anything from knitting to creating websites with LAMP tech. And when it comes right down to it I, and many others, don’t need to know all about how to make something sing and dance. For the most part I think we’re task driven and we’d like to find books dealing with that task. I’m looking to integrate MySQL databases with a website using PHP. I could give a damn how you can use MySQL for mission critical business applications.
Heck, they could drop about 100 pages out of each book by omitting one thing that always seems to be in there, but interests no one. If they dropped out the BS on the complete history of the program or programming language, I think a lot of people would be greatful. I don’t think that many people trying to learn something technical care that Edward Crotchraker of Yak Dick, OH created such and such programme way back in 1999. I don’t care how it evolved. I don’t wanna see the change log. I wanna do something with it, and I want to do it now. Teach me. I’ll look up the history on that web thingy later.