The "excluded middle" of technical books

http://blog.kiwitobes.com/?p=59

by toby • 18 years ago

8 2 18 years ago

blog.kiwitobes.com

Anyway, I guess what I’m getting at here, is that I’d like to see more books that fill out that middle ground - show me concepts, implementation and applications all at once

Okay, so let's pretend that there were two versions of the book: Standard and Professional Edition. Standard Edition ("SE") is the book in it's current form. The SE book costs $49.95 and is 1,000 pages.

The Professional Edition ("PE") book covers everything SE does as well as what you requested. It contains 2,500 pages of material... The book publisher can't print a 2,500 tech book so there are now two versions of PE: PE Vol 1 and PE Vol 2. Each costs $49.95.

So the question becomes - are you willing to pay double for having what you ask for ($49.95 for each PE Volume)? Or do you think it should just be included in the book already at no charge?

If you ask an author to write another 1,500 pages (as in our example), you should expect to pay that author a considerable sum for doing so, The problem is that the author would make 95+% of the proceeds for the book that's already in print (the SE version). He would earn the final 5% from geeks like you who bought it because it had the included middle. Yet the time to create the 5% of revenue was longer than the time to create the 95% revenue.

Capitalism.

neilc• 18 years ago

You seem to have missed out on the fact that the author has actually originally written a book that satisfies his criteria.

The problem isn't fixed merely by adding more content. The point is that there is value in a certain style of book that integrates an introduction to a technical topic, a concise description of the algorithms and data structures involved, and then a real-world application of the technique to an actual problem. The author's book, Programming Collective Intelligence, is only ~350 pages: the problem isn't a lack of space, the question is how book authors ought to use space that they have available. Whether books should be 1000 pages or 2500 pages is beside the point.

The "excluded middle" of technical books

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