
The Case for Buying Technical Books - jaycfields
http://blog.jayfields.com/2014/08/the-case-for-buying-technical-books.html
======
munificent
> When it's all said and done, it can take well over an hour of effort per
> page.

Emphasis on "well"! I think I'm at closer to 5x that and I don't consider
myself to have gone above and beyond. But, when you think about the total
amount of time all readers may spend reading it, what's a few hours per page?

> why would they take on a poorly paying second job?

This article seems to have the flawed premise that financial incentives are
the only incentives, or at least the only ones worth mentioning.

I've put a surprisingly large chunk of my life into the book I'm writing and
I've yet to make a dime. That may change soon once the print and ebook
versions are done, but I don't expect to financially recoup the time I put
into it.

But, I don't need to, either. Like many technical people, I'm paying my bills
OK. Extra cash never hurt, sure, but one thing I can't easily buy is gratitude
or appreciation. Writing a book and putting it online for free has given me
that in spades. That's the incentive that gave me enough motivation to
actually finish writing it. When I had a contract and an advance coming, the
cash wasn't enough to get me off my ass. Feeling like my writing made a
connection and helped people did.

If you want great technical people to write more, instead of buying more
books, why not just tell them you love their work and would love to learn more
from them?

~~~
dangets
Thanks for your book by the way! I loved it. (and it also made me recognize
your username, proving your appreciation/reputation argument)
[http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/](http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/)

~~~
munificent
Thanks!

~~~
k__
Did you just start to write stuff or did you learn about writing?

~~~
munificent
We've all been learning about writing since kindergarten. All of those book
reports and short stories are good practice for the fundamentals of grammar,
imagery, etc.

I did blog for a couple of years before I started on the book. But, honestly,
the most helpful thing was spending several years on reddit commenting very
heavily. I wrote _thousands_ of comments, and those are like writing bootcamp.

But there's definitely no dividing line between being able to "write" enough
to write a book versus being able to write a comment here on HN. It's all just
prose. The trick is just putting the time into writing and revising a lot of
it.

------
icebraining
_Around 2005 it became fairly easy to download, for free, practically any
book. It might be coincidence that 10 of 13 of these Must-Read books were
written prior to 2005._

Yes, it might be coincidence. Or it might be that the set of books written
prior to 2005 spans _30 years_ (since the first Lambda paper), while from 2005
to today there's only been 9 years.

Even taking the date of the last paper as its publishing date (1980), if we
assume that each year has the same probability of having a book on the list,
we should expect only 9/34 ~= 26% of the Must-Read books to be published after
2005.

And as it happens, 3/13 is ~23%, well within a reasonable margin of error.

~~~
dredmorbius
While the pre/post duration is of interest, there's also generally been a
tremendous increase in the volume of technical publishing. xkcd has a plot of
scientific publishing over time:
[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/58.full](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/58.full)

[http://theoceanofknowledge.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/infog...](http://theoceanofknowledge.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/infographic.jpg)

There's the question of whether or not publishing is increasing _within_
fields or that there's more publishing _in new areas_ , but it seems to me
that there should be an accelerating trend in publishing. Your assumption that
each year is equally likely to be represented strikes be as questionable.

~~~
icebraining
And there's obviously been an increase in technical publishing of software
matters: before we just had books, now he have books, plus blog posts, plus
online white papers, plus videos, etc.

I don't see how an increase in the publishing of scholarly papers implies an
expected increase in books, specifically.

~~~
dredmorbius
Books and academic publishing are related, if not identical, activities. I'd
expect there'd be some correlation. And the data for academic publishing
happened to be handy.

I suppose its probably possible to extract data from other sources -- ibiblio,
perhaps -- for books, but that would involve work.

There's also the matter that the xkcd infographic shows long-term trends. It's
entirely possible that there've been changes in recent years. Though that
would also be pretty remarkable.

The huge increase in online access to content and information has a bigger
effect though. I was purchasing a large number of books through the mid 2000s,
far fewer since. The fact that numerous physical bookstores I could head to
and shelf-browse have closed doesn't much help matters (I hate buying anything
online, books included, especially via Amazon).

------
mhartl
My cofounders and I developed Softcover [1] to support the business model used
by the Ruby on Rails Tutorial [2], which combines "tech cred" with a
profitable product business. I plan to reveal more detailed numbers soon, but
I can say that the Rails Tutorial has made an order of magnitude more money
than the "solid success" benchmark mentioned in the OP, despite (or perhaps
because of) making the book available for free online. (I include revenues
from screencasts, which are a lot of work to produce, but are much less work
than initially writing the book.) Thus, with a platform like Softcover,
authors don't have to choose between making money and building their brand.

[1]: [http://www.softcover.io/](http://www.softcover.io/)

[2]: [http://www.railstutorial.org/](http://www.railstutorial.org/), but watch
[http://news.railstutorial.org/](http://news.railstutorial.org/) for an
announcement of 3rd edition draft chapters, which I plan to start releasing
shortly

~~~
walterbell
Thanks for the pointer, encouraging to see success in online distribution
models with content bundles and a free tier. A few questions, if you don't
mind:

1) How critical were screencasts in convincing customers to purchase the ebook
versions?

2) How dependent is this business model on books which are attached to fast-
moving software?

3) Did you make any effort (like Scribd) to prevent scraping of content from
the online viewer?

4) Have you had to request DMCA takedowns of ebooks or screencasts?

5) Do you plan to provide guidance or best practices on screencast production?

~~~
mhartl
Thanks for your questions. Answers appear below.

 _1) How critical were screencasts in convincing customers to purchase the
ebook versions?_

The big money is in product bundles, but the ebooks sold well (~$100/day) even
before the screencasts launched. And that was back in 2010, when the Rails
Tutorial was just getting started.

 _2) How dependent is this business model on books which are attached to fast-
moving software?_

It cuts both ways, but I suspect it's generally better if the software _isn
't_ fast-moving. Products covering fast-moving software require updates that
lead to new sales cycles, but products covering slower-changing software have
much longer shelf-lives. As one data point, I've actually designed the 3rd
edition of the Rails Tutorial to be more future-proof than before, in the
hopes that I won't have to update it as often. (Even then, full updates have
only been required ever 1.5 years, with minor supplements in between.) And
some future products I have planned will be designed to be even more
evergreen.

 _3) Did you make any effort (like Scribd) to prevent scraping of content from
the online viewer?_

Not at all. The online version is plain HTML. You can even "save as PDF", but
the real ebooks are so much nicer that hardly anyone bothers. In general,
authors are way too paranoid about people stealing their content. You can give
away huge amounts of information as long as the product you're charging for
delivers real value.

 _4) Have you had to request DMCA takedowns of ebooks or screencasts?_

No.

 _5) Do you plan to provide guidance or best practices on screencast
production?_

Yes, if there's demand. I take it there might be. :-)

~~~
walterbell
Appreciate the insights.

> Yes, if there's demand. I take it there might be. :-)

Customers of softcover.io may be more comfortable spending $150 on additional
bundles if there was a well-defined baseline for screencast quality. The pitch
to potential authors and customers is to emulate the sales/quality success of
the Rails tutorial, so it's in the interest of all parties (platform,
customers, authors) to see that baseline met or exceeded.

Edit: will the "powered by softcover" banner/footer be required for authors
publishing on their own domain? If so, it would help all authors if the link
was directed to a list of domains "powered by softcover", rather than a pitch
for softcover itself.

~~~
mhartl
_Customers of softcover.io_

The idea is that Softcover's customers are the _authors_ , much like
WordPress's customers are bloggers. Purchasers of an author's products should
notice the Softcover name only incidentally. We want to help authors build
their own brands.

 _will the "powered by softcover" banner/footer be required for authors
publishing on their own domain?_

No, authors can optionally remove the footer.

~~~
walterbell
> We want to help authors build their own brands.

Don't underestimate the assistance that your brand can give to the brands of
your authors. While toolsets for e-publishing may not act as editorial
gateways, they still exercise a form of affinity/aesthetic filtering that can
provide a discovery signal to book buyers.

Even a quick browse of the leanpub site (cited elsewhere in this thread)
showed a clear difference from softcover viewing aesthetics. Over time, you
may discover a correlation between "authors who liked the softcover toolchain"
and "readers who buy from more than one softcover author". That would last
until word got out, then you would have a flood of new authors who were
attracted primarily by revenue opportunity, not toolchain/distribution
aesthetics.

BTW, it's quite informative whether someone chooses to publish on WordPress,
Blogspot, Tumblr, statically-generated html, or Facebook.

------
ghshephard
The interesting (tragic?) part of this is that other parts of the book writing
process do pay ok.

I was a technical editor for Understanding and Deploying LDAP, 2nd Edition,
and Addison Wesley paid me $5000 for my work. There were two technical
editors, I presume the other tech editor received the same remuneration.

I _very_ carefully tracked my effort - it took about six months, and and I was
able to take a friday off every other week from work thanks to an enlightened
boss who saw that it would be useful for his LDAP administrator to enhance his
skills in such a manner.

So, 6 months x twice a month x 8 hours - about 100 hours of work, or $50/hour.

Of course, I was also drawing a Salary at the time, and the _real_ reason I
was doing this, was out of passion. I was determined to make sure not a single
issue got by me. I labbed out every example. Tested out every command.
Verified every URL. Flagged everything that wasn't 100% clear to me.

But - I realize that as a technical editor, I was probably putting in < 5% of
the effort that the two authors were putting into this, even if it was a
second edition (which presumably meant less effort than the seminal first
edition).

At the end of the day - every technical boot author I know either did it out
of desire to create something create, or to build out their reputation.

I've never met one who actually thought they could make any type of living
doing it.

------
WoodenChair
I wrote a technical book this year (well the project took almost a year and
was released this year) and it did indeed help build my brand a bit (although
there are other obvious concrete steps I should take like improving my
portfolio and writing a technical blog). The author is right that it's a
colossal effort. I went with a traditional publisher, and they expect high
standards. They will provide you with several editors, reviewers, etc, but
ultimately you need to spend the hundreds or thousands of hours sitting down
and typing the 300+ pages.

I don't recommend bad writers write technical books. I also don't recommend
people who don't read regularly write technical books. Ultimately writing a
_good_ technical book requires a lot of the same things as writing any other
kind of book: dedication, perseverance, writing skills, and attention to
detail (and let's not forget extensive domain knowledge). It's not doable by
most people given their time constraints, IMHO.

The author's assumptions about compensation are off though. You're lucky if
you sell 2000 copies in most technical markets, and your royalty rate is above
12%. Forget that if you have a coauthor. Your main compensation is indeed the
brand building unfortunately (plus a small advance).

~~~
billpollock
We offer our authors a choice of royalties -- from 12 to 15 percent. Most
choose the 12 percent option but many still take 15 percent.

Several of our technical titles have sold well over 20,000 copies but we've
also had the rare title sell in the 2-3,000 copy range. That is definitely
rare and only on very niche topics.

Writing a technical book is a lot of work on both ends, especially when a
publisher provides real editorial and marketing support. Unfortunately, most
no longer do, which is unfortunate for all involved and a good argument for
considering self-publishing. After all, if publishers aren't offering added
services, why not self-publish?

We read and edit every word before a book goes to copyedit. I've personally
spent well over 300 hours editing individual titles. If you were to hire
someone to do that work the minimum cost would be $15,000.

I'd love to see more people writing technical books -- good technical books --
for love of the subject and out of a desire to share knowledge. Sure, a good
book will build your brand, but make it great, first.

The world always needs more good books. Our watchwords are "fewer, better
books." Aim to be great.

~~~
WoodenChair
My publisher also provided most of the above (extensive copyediting,
developmental editing, and technical review). Given how niche the market is,
I'm quite happy with sales so far. As far as marketing goes, it's hard for me
to tell as an author how extensive the support has been.

I guess you're selling so many copies of each book (and based on your
watchwords) by being quite selective about what titles you publish?

For the record, I do think my book is _great_ but writing a book is not black
and white - it's such a big endeavor that there is generally more than one
motivation. I also didn't want to self call.

------
zrail
Self-publishing is the way to go. I built my own platform to sell my book
Mastering Modern Payments[1] but if I were starting from scratch I would
strongly consider something like Softcover.

Since launch it's made approximately $35k. Not quite the solid success that
the OP talks about, but then again I invested far less time than the OP
suggests.

[1]: [https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-
payments](https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments)

~~~
jaycfields
That's really great. An extra $35k is always a good thing. I published my
second book ([http://wewut.com](http://wewut.com)) on
[http://leanpub.com](http://leanpub.com), and I've been really happy with the
results.

------
Silhouette
I used to buy a lot of technical books, but the last few books on topics like
programming or web development that I bought are still sitting on my shelf
mostly unread, and I'm not sure I've bought any new ones for several years
now.

There is a simple reason for that, which has nothing to do with the economics
of writing books or even the editorial quality: with the pace of the industry
today, the material in a technical book about any specific development tool or
technique or language may well be obsolete before it even hits the shelves.

If there were more technical books with general accumulated wisdom, insightful
analysis, and advice that will stand the test of time, I'd be interested. If
they had good production quality and editorial standards, I'd be even more
interested (because frankly, hardly any of the last few computing books I
bought did, even those from supposedly respectable publishers).

But take a look at the new releases lists on Amazon, and certainly at the
bestsellers lists or what you find in a bricks 'n' mortar bookshop, and almost
everything published in the past few years has either a version number or a
"for dummies/beginners" tag in the title. Chances are that I can get material
at least as good, often much better, and almost always more up-to-date, just
by identifying a few experts on-line and browsing their blog/articles/project
docs. Printed books are obsolete as a mechanism for conveying information on
these subjects.

In short, there are a few classics in computing fields that still sell well,
but how many books destined to become classics have been published in these
fields in the past decade? And for anything that isn't, why would anyone buy
the limited, ephemeral book when the Internet exists?

~~~
bcbrown
In general, I agree with you. But one counter-example would be my experience
with Hive in Spring 2013. Our team of four had to ramp up on a very aggressive
deadline without knowing anything about Hive. One of my colleagues picked up
the O'Reilly book on Hive, and it was by far the most extensive,
comprehensive, and convenient reference. The online resources I found were
either outdated, incomplete, or would take much more time to find the answer I
was looking for.

Another example would be several months later, when I got a job at a company
with a lot of Hadoop work, not having much experience with writing MapReduce
code. I had two weeks between jobs, so I picked up 4 books on Hadoop. It's
less than a day's salary, and allowed me to feel like I could hit the ground
running at the new job (and I did). Those books are all outdated now, but I
still feel like I got my money's worth from them.

------
noelwelsh
Well... the fundamental flaw in the business model is going via a traditional
publisher. The new model, which has been validated by a number of people, is
to:

1\. publish online and capture 70%+ of the revenue; and

2\. offer different bundles so people can pay according to the value they
receive.

The second point is the most important, and where traditional publishers fail.
$79 for a technical book might feel like a lot to an individual but $299 for a
10 person licence is so cheap to a company that it's not worth thinking about.

FWIW, I'm writing a book on Scala and I'm not embarrassed to say I have an
ulterior motive for it. It takes up far too much time to do otherwise. I
believe it's going to be a fairly good book -- better than anything else on
the market -- and that's because I'm taking ideas from great books such as
HtDP and SICP (with acknowledgement, of course).

------
rotten
I've met several managers who have flat out stated that they believe a
technical person with a lot of books on their desk isn't very technical or
skilled. They'd rather have employees who actually knew stuff and didn't have
to look it up in books - or at least knew how to google the answers.

These (non-technical) managers have said that having a lot of books doesn't
make you look smart, it actually has the opposite effect.

They actively discouraged staff from at least publicly turning to books to
learn stuff.

I'm not saying I agree or disagree with this point of view - I'm just pointing
out that it is a point of view that is out there and seems to be fairly common
among non-technical managers.

~~~
GuiA
Those people are brain damaged and should probably be banned from society
altogether. Next time you see one of those managers, please kick them in their
reproductive parts to ensure they don't endanger the future for our children
as well.

------
arikrak
Books seem like an old-fashioned way to teach programming. Wouldn't it make
sense to create more interactive content so readers/users can try out the code
as they go along? I think this is definitely true for beginners learning
programming, but shouldn't it also apply to many cases of more advanced
programming knowledge?

My plug: My site [http://www.learneroo.com](http://www.learneroo.com) has
educational modules primarily for beginners learning programming, but I'm
thinking of expanding it to more advanced topics. Anyone interested in
publishing their content on it?

~~~
jamesbritt
_Wouldn 't it make sense to create more interactive content so readers/users
can try out the code as they go along?_

One upside to the days of paper-only was that I was forced to hand-enter a lot
of code to see it in action. It made me pay more attention to the code than if
I had just cut-n-pasted or loaded up a file.

Often the code would fail the first time I tried to run it. Then I needed to
figure out where the error was. It was quite instructional.

RFDL (run-fail-debug-loop) is a very useful approach to learning.

~~~
arikrak
To learn something well you need to practice it and can't just copy and paste.
I think that copying-and-pasting by typing isn't that much better though. It
would be better to solve challenges and the like so that you really need to
think.

My question is maybe professional programmers aren't as interested in doing
'assigned' challenges and would rather apply what they learn to their own
projects. Though I still think there's still a large market for more
interactive professional training.

------
tel
> _If you 're, like I am, tired of having to choose between books written
> decades ago and books written by those with at least a slightly ulterior
> motive_

I find that most of my favorite books _were_ written decades ago. New stuff is
too boring to be worth books half the time.

That said, I buy books regularly and _completely_ agree with the net advice.
Support authors and make it a valuable career to work hard, build good
knowledge, and share it.

Wikipedia can only get you so far.

------
andyakb
Why the hate for consultants who write books? If they dont provide value in
the material then sure, that sucks, but if it is worthwhile information why
should I care if they use it to help get consulting clients? Shouldnt I be
happy that consulting allows people with valuable things to say to publish it
for a price I can afford?

~~~
jaycfields
No hate for consultants from me. The opposite, actually:
[http://blog.jayfields.com/2012/05/single-best-thing-for-
my-c...](http://blog.jayfields.com/2012/05/single-best-thing-for-my-
career.html)

Consultants should write books, but I believe we'd all benefit if non-
consultants wrote books as well.

------
pawelkomarnicki
The problem with technical books is that most of the new releases are almost
expired by the time they reach my desk, mostly because the stuff changes and
evolves so quickly. It's amazing how rapidly our trade gets updated and
upgraded with new concepts, tools and good practices...

------
WalterBright
I don't write books, but I have a hobby converting some books I like to html
and making them available. There's no way that they pay for the time it takes
to make them, but it pleases me anyway.

------
reboog711
I've written three books for a traditional publisher (Osborne / McGrawHill )
back at the turn of the century. They were on Adobe (then Macromedia)
ColdFusion:
[http://www.instantcoldfusion.com](http://www.instantcoldfusion.com) .

At the time, they were estimating 20K units as the break even point. Most
books sold 5K units, give or take. I still get royalty statements with
returns, despite having no sales in years. No chance I'll ever make up the
advance and start receiving royalties.

However, having books with your name on it makes it very easy to convince
people who have no way to judge your skills that you know what you are doing.
I believe it helped launch my consulting career. I start my 15th year in
business in about a month.

After the books; I moved onto writing shorter-length articles and podcasting.
In my years of podcasting (
[http://www.theflexshow.com](http://www.theflexshow.com) ), I made the same
amount of money as I did publishing those three books for Osborne. ( Thanks to
a six month sponsorship from Adobe ).

I kept track of my time on my second and third book. I averaged 20 hours per
chapter, which is probably slightly less than 1 hour per page.

When Adobe Flex took off [and publishers started calling]; they were
estimating 5K units as a roaring success for a book. So, things changed in
that decade. However, I was smarter at that point and asked about marketing /
sales questions. I would think someone wanting to publish a book could tell me
what the size of the market was and what their expected penetration was. But,
all I got was a lot of blank stares, with the occasional "O'Rielly had book
that did well". I passed on writing any books on Flex.

When Flex/Flash took a nose dive; I shut down my podcast and turned focus back
to writing. The results are a self-published training course on AngularJS for
Flex Developers (
[https://www.lifeafterflex.com](https://www.lifeafterflex.com) ). It uses the
"Authority" model of publishing, with the lowest tier being pay what you want;
and the highest tier including 6 hours of screencasts on AngularJS.

The series has seen more staying power than I expected [Pay what you want
sales trickle in a few each month; although no one has purchased the higher
tiers since launch]. I do expect to make up my cash expenditure on the project
(Copy editing + Web site design); but I'll never make up for my time. Total
sales have been in the $2K range.

But, I had a client hire me to do a conversion of an app from Flex to
AngularJS; so that doesn't hurt the 'cash flow'.

I think the release would have been more successful it it came a year and a
half earlier. I also think I may have built it for a market that is too
narrow.

Right now; I'm working on extending that series to include a book about
building the backend with NodeJS instead of ColdFusion. It should be out by
the end of next month.

Hopefully some of this is interesting.

