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A comment on Dive Into 2010: HTML5 Book Reflection. Parent comment

Re:Dive Into 2010: HTML5 Book Reflection by cookiecaper on Monday January 10, 2011 @01:47AM (#2087737)
What does "net income" mean here? Is that supposed to mean profit? If so, that's a pretty small piece. Why should O' Reilly get 90% of the money merely for their distribution channel and printing press? I realize many companies do this "because they can" or they think they can, but hopefully our industry is not interested in supporting such groups; we should only buy from publishers that operate business under fair terms. Perhaps a fair shake would be 75/25, or even something as low as 50/50, but 90/10 to a group that didn't even produce the content is pretty hard to swallow from an ethical standpoint.

I would really like to know more about what goes into O' Reilly's "net income" figure.

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Re:Dive Into 2010: HTML5 Book Reflection by lukestevens on Monday January 10, 2011 @04:14AM (#2087939)
It means the money the publisher gets after the retailer takes their cut (which is usually 50%).

Generally speaking, tech publishers have a sausage factory-like production line books get pushed through. There's editors, designers, marketing, and acquisitions people involved in taking the author's manuscript through to a finished product, so that's where the money goes.

It also gets spent on all the dreck tech publishers (again, in general) pump out -- they work on a hits model, so they publish 20 books and hope one of them takes off. Their main function is to nag authors to get their work done.

I've heard "[book] publishing is broken" over and again, and it's true. Tech publishers only pay peanuts, so authors get pushed to finish the book quickly (if they start at all), so the quality isn't very good, so people don't buy many books, so tech publishers can only afford to pay peanuts...

Sadly, not much has changed for the major tech publishers since the late 90s at least, when Philip Greenspun wrote about his experience in 1997: http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/story

That said, there are publishers which give their authors a better deal -- Pragmatic Programmers for one (which Peter Cooper discusses -- see link in his comment), who pay 50% as discussed here: http://pragdave.blogs.pragprog.com/pragdave/2009/10/pragmati... . They may not do the same volume as the majors, but I doubt it's 5x less. Anyway, I agree it would be more healthy if those buying books bought from publishers who gave their authors a fairer deal; however I'd really like to see authors support businesses that support them -- they're the ones with the product after all. The more we can support highly efficient indie publishers, the more the book reading community will grow around them, the healthier the ecosystem on the whole will be, imo.

Failing that, I'd like to see tech giants like Google just give employees who write a book a $5k raise, cover editing/production costs for $5k, and then use the self-publishing infrastructure (with the same $1/book for the author) & free electronic distribution to get the books out there as far and wide as possible - $9 print, $0.99/free PDF/app, free web version, say.

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