

Programming Book Profits - mqt
http://ejohn.org/blog/programming-book-profits/

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DocSavage
"No one buys E-books."

Nobody buys ebooks when the publishers set a high price relative to printed
books and have limited outlets for purchase. Also, there isn't a rendering
device for the written word comparable to a book or an ipod. Then there are
DRM issues for some ebooks.

1) Price -- You can get the printed book with free shipping for $29.69 from
Amazon. I can only find the e-book at Apress.com. It costs $22.50. So I get a
$7 discount when there's no shipping cost, no printing cost, no retailer cut,
and no distribution cut. There's no ebook alternative, from what I can see, at
Amazon for Pro Javascript Techniques on Kindle or basic PDF. Is the author
getting any more royalty from an ebook sale even though a lot of the overhead
is cut out?

2) Rendering device -- This is less of an issue for a programming title,
because most of the readers are tethered to a computer anyway. Still, there's
very little consumer penetration for very portable ebook devices like the Sony
Reader and Amazon Kindle. (I'm talking eInk devices that you can treat like a
book.)

The digital music market took off because the portable rendering devices are
awesome relative to the traditional systems. A little ipod delivers music just
as good (to my ears) as the big stereos a decade or two before it. It's small,
easy to use, and allows easy random access.

Ebooks have to compete against the book, which has great random access by
flipping pages, no battery issues, and is easy to mark up. If they had an
ebook reader with flexible display sheets like a page, you'd see a lot more
ebooks getting sold.

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mattmaroon
Ha, he should have mentioned that most publishing contracts allow you to hire
outside auditors to track how many copies were sold and for how much. I'm
actually considering doing that for mine.

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nickb
Book authors get screwed worse than musicians with their CD deals.

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mynameishere
He's getting between 10 percent to 20 percent per book. That's pretty good.
Some really bad book contracts will specifiy 15 percent royalties on a book's
_profit_...thus maybe $2.00 x .15

