4 ms·

I'm flabbergasted by a digital-only edition being $82. That's a price I'd find step even for print. I paid less than that for the print+digital combination of T

• krapht 4y ago
  Textbooks are a lot more work to prepare than people think, and the market is in the thousands. Especially specialist textbooks like this require the input of many upper-middle class professionals who aren't exactly cheap - much like software. I mean, how much time do you think it would cost to prepare a 400 page textbook on Amazon AWS, with curated examples and training exercises? How many man-hours of senior engineering talent would be required? How many copies could you realistically sell? Some textbook authors have previously posted on HN that the money is terrible in technical books, and the biggest benefit has just been credibility that the authors can use to sell themselves as consultants.
  • ta988 4y ago
    The issue here is that publishers are raking up all the money and not even providing a good service anymore. The physical quality of my recent books, the formatting of the ebooks and the typesetting has gone downhill in the last 10 years or so. Books prices are still high, publisher profits are skyrocketing and quality of product goes down. It is time to setup a new way to support writters for publishing their books that doesn't involve those scammers. Not every writer can do their own typesetting and distribution.
• BeetleB 4y ago
  20 years ago, most engineering textbooks were about $100 in the US. I discovered they sell them cheaper in Europe, and the cost to buy from Europe + shipping was still a lot cheaper.