For small-run offset printing (as opposed to laser-printer-quality stuff you get from print-on-demand shops, including PoD reissues of old titles the big academ

For small-run offset printing (as opposed to laser-printer-quality stuff you get from print-on-demand shops, including PoD reissues of old titles the big academic publishers sell under the guise of new copies), the books themselves are basically free compared to the plates. A bookshop owner who also worked in printing once told me it was in the order of $1M for the plates for a 300-page book, and then negligible costs for the actual books until you get past at least tens of thousands of copies. So printing one manual or a hundred of them is a very different proposition from a normal-sized run of like 50k of them.