Programming Book Profits
ejohn.org
ejohn.org
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.