Ruby Books -- A Question

ruby-talk
1

Anyone care to speculate
as to what may be the cause and what we could do?

One datapoint: I’ve been told by someone in the industry that last year
sales of technical books were down by ~35% from the year before and the
year before (2001) they were down ~15% from the year before that.

I think the recession has to by playing a part- though that’s not the
whole reason.

It’s not just technical books. Publishers in general are in a long decline:

http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/techwrapper.jsp?PID=1051-250&CID=1051
-013003B

This article is about the problems the (paper) book industry is
currently facing, including a discussion of ebooks.

The first paragraph reads:

“Retail book publishers are in trouble. A decade ago, they could
expect a healthy 10% profit margin selling books in bookstores. Now
publishers’ profits are less than half that, averaging around 4%.
Their bookstore sales have also dropped in each of the past five
years.”

Roger Sperberg

2

OUCH! sign of the times i guess. but God save the trees! or as my pappy use to
say:

"kill a beer, save a tree."

i’ve thought of a book that might do well though, and be helpful to ruby,
basically entitled: Why You Should Program in Ruby. very point blank ruby
evangelism. it would be a small book, maybe 100 pages with all the neato
pragmatic programming and design pattern ideas and good examples of all the
great ways in which ruby can improve a programmer’s programming.

just a thought. could be a fun little project for the right persons.

by the way, if you’re wondering about Pappy’s quote, its a drunken slip on:

"kill a beaver, save a tree" ;-)
···

On Friday 31 January 2003 07:43 am, Sperberg, Roger wrote:

“Retail book publishers are in trouble. A decade ago, they could
expect a healthy 10% profit margin selling books in bookstores. Now
publishers’ profits are less than half that, averaging around 4%.
Their bookstore sales have also dropped in each of the past five
years.”

–
tom sawyer, aka transami
transami@transami.net

3

One word: Amazon

:slight_smile:

···

On Friday, 31 January 2003 at 23:43:17 +0900, Sperberg, Roger wrote:

It’s not just technical books. Publishers in general are in a long decline:

http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/techwrapper.jsp?PID=1051-250&CID=1051
-013003B

This article is about the problems the (paper) book industry is
currently facing, including a discussion of ebooks.

The first paragraph reads:

“Retail book publishers are in trouble. A decade ago, they could
expect a healthy 10% profit margin selling books in bookstores. Now
publishers’ profits are less than half that, averaging around 4%.
Their bookstore sales have also dropped in each of the past five
years.”

–
Jim Freeze

Don’t take life so serious, son, it ain’t nohow permanent.
– Walt Kelly

4

“Retail book publishers are in trouble. A decade ago, they could
expect a healthy 10% profit margin selling books in bookstores. Now
publishers’ profits are less than half that, averaging around 4%.
Their bookstore sales have also dropped in each of the past five
years.”

It’s hard to understand how the profit margins could be as low as even 10%,
given the cost of technical books here in Australia.

Most of the O’Reilly books, for example, are currently selling for between
AUD105 and AUD120. Only a couple of years ago, the average price was AUD75.

I realise it costs more money than one would imagine to produce a book, but
unless they’re only selling a couple of thousand copies, it’s difficult to
see how they couldn’t be making a serious profit at that price.

At current prices, I just don’t buy anywhere near as many technical books as I
once did. I’m happier to spend time finding free resources on the net, like
tutorials written for CS courses, or asking questions on mailing lists.

Actually, what I’d love to see would be for publishers to make more books
available on CD-ROM, to save on the printing costs, passing those savings on
to the reader.

While I like reading paper documents, I’d actually prefer to print out a
couple of chapters at a time, to carry with me. For reference purposes, a
well designed CD-ROM is a much better tool.

I’m sure, of course, that I don’t fit into the average publisher’s demographic
:-).

5

That can be done by anyone and put on a website. With sufficient
attention to detail and presentation, it would be indistinguishable
from a book.

Gavin

···

On Saturday, February 1, 2003, 2:01:01 AM, Tom wrote:

i’ve thought of a book that might do well though, and be helpful to ruby,
basically entitled: Why You Should Program in Ruby. very point blank ruby
evangelism. it would be a small book, maybe 100 pages with all the neato
pragmatic programming and design pattern ideas and good examples of all the
great ways in which ruby can improve a programmer’s programming.

6

“Retail book publishers are in trouble. A decade ago, they could
expect a healthy 10% profit margin selling books in bookstores. Now
publishers’ profits are less than half that, averaging around 4%.
Their bookstore sales have also dropped in each of the past five
years.”

It’s hard to understand how the profit margins could be as low as even 10%,
given the cost of technical books here in Australia.

Most of the O’Reilly books, for example, are currently selling for between
AUD105 and AUD120. Only a couple of years ago, the average price was AUD75.

I realise it costs more money than one would imagine to produce a book, but
unless they’re only selling a couple of thousand copies, it’s difficult to
see how they couldn’t be making a serious profit at that price.

Read the full article. It’s not the publishers that are getting the profit,
it’s the middlemen.

···

At current prices, I just don’t buy anywhere near as many technical books as I
once did. I’m happier to spend time finding free resources on the net, like
tutorials written for CS courses, or asking questions on mailing lists.

Actually, what I’d love to see would be for publishers to make more books
available on CD-ROM, to save on the printing costs, passing those savings on
to the reader.

While I like reading paper documents, I’d actually prefer to print out a
couple of chapters at a time, to carry with me. For reference purposes, a
well designed CD-ROM is a much better tool.

I’m sure, of course, that I don’t fit into the average publisher’s demographic
:-).

7

Read the full article. It’s not the publishers that are getting the
profit, it’s the middlemen.

Hmmm … from the article, it sounds like publishers don’t have much business
sense.

What I don’t understand, still, is that if it’s the large bookstore chains
that are creating the overpricing, why is it that if I go to a smaller
bookshop I still see the same price tags? You’d think they would need to
avoid adding the same level of margin, in order to compete with the larger
stores. Maybe that implies that most of the margin is being added by the
wholesalers.

Oh well. As I say, they don’t get my money these days. About the only thing
I would spend it on would be an updated edition of PR or some new Ruby
titles, if they can ever make it out, given the publishing indusftry’s
apparent malaise.