E-books

I spoke to a few .NET authors who have written their own books. No one writes books for the money because there is not a lot of money in it. Recently, I came across in Amazon a well-known .NET author moving into the e-books category.

Dan Appleman (also known as Daniel Appleman) is a well-known author of Visual Basic titles. He's recently turned his attention to publishing and selling e-books on Amazon. His first e-book title was Hijacking .NET (only 39 pages for $9.95), which was reported in Slashdot com; I am sure he made a killing with that one. His e-books offerings are more focused but have fewer pages than his regular books. Because they are smaller, e-books take much less time to write; as a result, he can produce many more titles. I have discovered at least 13 e-books authored by him versus 12 regular books.

I wonder if he has found a winning formula for making money off of his books. Are the economics of selling e-books more favorable than that of regular books? Since he self-publishes his e-books, the only people who make money off of his books are Amazon and himself. One of his e-books, Regular Expressions in .NET, has a high sales rank of 275 and costs just $14.95. On the other hand, Applenman has written at least one regular book since 2000.

Comments

[Elliotte Rusty Harold]

Ridiculous! If you aren't making money writing computer books, you aren't doing it right. And in my experience most developers writing books indeed aren't doing it right. Professional developers do not normally act like professional authors. They don't have agents. They don't negotiate contracts. They don't analyze the market for the book. They don't publicize it effectively; and they do a hundred other things wrong. Authors like Dan Appleman and me who've written 12+ books know how to do it right, and that's why we keep writing, and make a very nice living at it too.

There are other reasons one may choose to write a book besides the purely mercenary, of course. However, even if you're writing for the love of the subject, you can still produce a profitable book if you put as much effort into the publishing as you do into the programming.

[James Curran]

Hmmm... 9.95 for 39 page & 14.95 for 68 pages does seem rather steep.... Particularly when you consider his per-copy royality probably comes out to being the same for these e-pamphlets as it is for a 1000-page hardcopy tome, (Maybe ERH can update my figures, but I've been told a typical writer get 15% of wholesale price which is about 7.5% of the retail price, which translates to $3.75 for a $49.95 hardcopy book.) assuming Amazon's commission on an e-book is less that 60% (it's 55% for a hardcopy book and 15% for zShop item -- a e-book should fall somewhere between those two).

The other problem I have with this, particularly in Appleman's case, is his choice of PDF files -- which, in my use of them, are good for only one thing: printing out -- on paper the exact same dimensions as it was written. Microsoft's Reader (.Lit) format can at least adapt itself to the dimensions of the screen it's been read on.

[Adam Kinney]

"...adapt itself to the dimensions of the screen it's been read on."

Sounds like a lead into the "XAML As Documents" posts...

As far as Appleman's eBooks, they seems pricey to me, but I guess if you are getting the information you need right when you need it, its worth it. Maybe when I get a Tablet PC it will be different, but the form factor of reading an e-book just doesn't match a paperbound book; but then again if its only 38 pages it may not be as much of an issue.