The Programming Book Business
I’ve blogged about this before — the programming book industry continues to fascinate me. Jeff Atwood comments this week on it, talking about how "The Internet has rendered programming books obsolete." Lately, there has been a resurgence of Delphi books, lead by Marco Cantu and others, but these guys are not using traditional book publishing channels, but rather are taking advantage of the budding "on demand publishing" industry, most notably on lulu.com. I know that I first do a Google search if I have a programming issue, and if I want to learn to do something new, I tend look first to the Internet rather than for a book. But that doesn’t mean that books aren’t valuable — they are.
I still buy programming books, but I find that I don’t buy the books that "teach you to program <insert language name> in <insert ever shrinking period of time>." Instead, like Jeff Atwood, I tend to buy books about the practice of software development — my latest is Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert L. Glass. This is a cool book. Easy to read, and full of terrific nuggets of wisdom. Probably my all time favorite is The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. Atwood makes a great, great point when he says, "If you feel compelled to clean house on your bookshelf every five years, trust me on this, you’re buying the wrong programming books." I think he’s dead on about that. (I’m happy to note that the two books I mentioned above are in his list of top five programming books. 
I need to get Peopleware
I have been involved with the publishing of a few books done in the "old-school" way, and I dare say it is really, really inefficient. Really inefficient. Really, really inefficient. There were editors and more editors and them some other editors. And they don’t know one thing about programming. (I remember a book in the early days of Delphi where an editor decided that the word "Pascal" should be replaced with "Delphi" everywhere. Or maybe it was the other way around. In any event, it wasn’t pretty.) You have to submit your work to them in a special MS Word template, and then they comment (generally very ignorantly), and then you do a huge back and forth with them. Then of course, once the book fiiiinally gets past that treacherous gauntlet, they print up boxes and boxes and boxes of them, ship them all around the country, put them on shelves, sell a few, and eventually box the remainders up again and send them back to the publisher. They pay the author a very small royalty relative to the book price. This whole thing simply does not make sense to me.
Marco Cantu was here last week — and he graciously gave me a signed copy of his new "Essential Pascal". This book was printed on demand by Lulu, and is a nicely made and bound as any book I have. Marco has been very pleased with the way his Lulu publishing as gone. Julian Bucknall has said the same thing about his The Tomes of Delphi: Algorithms and Data Structures. There is a nice collection of Delphi books on Lulu, including a number of them from Dr. Bob as well. (Ray Konopka, call your agent!)
On demand publishing is clearly the future. It’s a classic case of cutting out the middle man. A guy like Marco makes a lot more money per book sale, so he doesn’t have to sell as many books to make it worth his while. This enables authors to publish books of smaller and tighter scopes — that is, books that the traditional publishing industry wouldn’t touch in a million years. This is good for authors — they make money where they wouldn’t have been able to previously.
It is also good for customers — they get books that they want that would never have been published under the previous model. Prices are lower, too, because with the overhead gone, authors can charge less and still make more. It’s simply a vastly superior business model. And the cool thing is that anyone can publish almost any book at all, and sell it to anyone. You could, quite literally, take that paper you wrote for a conference a while back, work it up a bit, and be selling online in a week. I don’t know why I haven’t done it.
Why haven’t you? 
Thanx for the idea Nick. I wrote a book about Delphi in my mother language (Indonesia). I have a publisher to make it available and for distribution to book stores.
Now I plan to publish my next book by myself, promote and sell it online!
May 2nd, 2008 at 8:35 pmFollow-up post at http://www.bobswart.nl/Weblog/Blog.aspx?RootId=5:2214
May 3rd, 2008 at 1:49 amI subscribe to Your thought!. Books generally cover a host of topics, most of what you do not need. Possibly you are looking into a specific topic in a book. Why pay for the entire book. The style of writing will change over a period of time where reader decides his level and gets pages printed at his level from a Novice to an Expert like (MSDN .Net 3.5/2.0/1.0 Relevant Page)
May 3rd, 2008 at 2:56 amNick
May 3rd, 2008 at 11:25 amYou don’t need to write a book. You need to do some more camtasias. The first 30 were excellent but we need more. Wider and deeper into the subject. Do them in sets of 30 and you can have a day off most months. OK?
Hello, i am using Delphi for about 9 years now and i think that camtasia video is more important and is the future to knowledge.I have 3 books (1 from lulu) from marco and i have 1 original copy of turbo Delphi from the 2005 (i think) is the only programming tool i have and i think i am using only the 50% of his power (i am thinking to buy delphi 2007 win32 now).I am watching this videos again and again and really help me a lot to make this percent 60% or even 70%.Thank you Codegear and Mr. Hodges and sorry for my bad English and for the big post!!!
May 3rd, 2008 at 12:13 pmlulu.com is bad because i’m ordering delphi 2007 handbook on lulu.com.
delphi 2007 handbook + shipping = 46,56$
May 3rd, 2008 at 1:51 pmnow, book on customs and customs duty + other tax = 300 $
My experiences with LuLu have been great, even with customs duty, etc (I’m in Canada). I gotta wonder where ahmet is that duties on books are so outrageous.
I would like to extend this thought to why doesn’t CodeGear use LuLu?
The PDFs you make available for things like the language guide could EASILY be posted on LuLu - and those of us who want physical manuals (have been begging for them to come back since they were dropped in D3 in fact) can just order copies printed by Lulu. I’m pretty sure they are already print ready in their PDF format, so really, if someone at CodeGear was to get them listed, I’m sure a few sales would follow at no real inconvenience to CodeGear itself (I can pretty much guarentee I’d buy the object pascal language guide within 30 days of it going up, maybe even a few of the others, if they weren’t too insanely priced)
Come on, take an hour, conscript David I to help & toss em up on LuLu over the next month! It’s not like CodeGear has anything to lose from the deal, and frankly it would make some of us very happy.
May 3rd, 2008 at 1:59 pmIt will be great to read your first book published in Lulu.
I think language specific books still are necessary (and maybe always will be) to the people starting a career. I mean the people learning a first language, and of course Pascal still be a very good option to the first language. These books, of course, will be "cleaned" from the bookshelf a lot of time before the five years boundary… but they remain in your mind with the best books.
I remember the "Programando con Turbo Pascal 7.0" by Luis Joyanes (spain) and the "Mastering Delphi 3.0" by Marco Cantu, which are the first books I read on programing with each of these languages, a LOT, LOT of time ago. My first book on delphi was "Aprendiendo delphi 1 en 21 días", but it’s not my decision, but my boss. Believe it or not, the book helped me a lot in my first weeks working with it.
May 3rd, 2008 at 2:33 pmClinton –
We are working with lulu.com to get our materials available there. We can’t just "toss them up" because we have to set up a business account — something that is harder that it should be from the lulu.com side.
Nick
May 3rd, 2008 at 3:32 pm@Ahmet
May 4th, 2008 at 4:36 amI am curious, where are you living? In which country would a 47 USD book purchase end up as 300 USD? Lulu.com also has a department in EU in Spain. Would it be cheaper for you custom duty wise to buy from there?
Doei RIF
Yes the Pragmatic Programmer is an awesome book.
Any Delphi person who has not purchased Marco’s book from Lulu should do so immediately - mind you if it’s going to cost $300 to get it shipped to you then get the electronic version - and I thought $25 to get it shipped to New Zealand was a bit steep, I guess I don’t know how lucky I am
I have reviewed both books on my website for those interested (as well as a few others - my favorite is still Code Complete 2 however).
Alister
May 4th, 2008 at 3:33 pmhttp://codegearguru.com
"We can’t just "toss them up" because we have to set up a business account — something that is harder that it should be from the lulu.com side."
Man that’s lame
May 4th, 2008 at 4:56 pmNick -> Great to hear. Sorry that they’ve made some of the process so absurd. Maybe you should take a page from my book, and track down someone in the chain, and give them a piece of yer… errr…. I mean, have a constructive chat about the problems you have had with their process in the hopes of improving things in the future.
Honest, I swear, I wasn’t backsliding at all… No really… No foaming at the mouth or anything, see??
May 4th, 2008 at 6:00 pmIt would be nice if you’d epublish too, so those who prefer ebooks can buy those. But in HTML, not pdf please. Technical PDF does not reflow well even if reflow is allowed.
Otherwise I’m faced with buying it and ripping it myself (which makes Ahmed’s customs cost look cheap) or downloading it off pirate sites, with or without the dead tree tax.
May 4th, 2008 at 9:53 pmI’ve seen that most beginners that "learnt" to program without reading books have many flaws. "Learning through the Internet" is often fragmentary, beginners sometimes can’t discriminate good sources from bad ones (it happens with books too, but when you have to pay you become more careful). I always suggest to beginners to buy a good book to start with.
May 5th, 2008 at 12:09 amWhen you are experienced books may be less useful, but never useless.
nice blog about this one. thanks. n__n
May 5th, 2008 at 3:35 amClinton –
No problem.
It is frustrating that Lulu makes it harder than it needs to be. I’m still a huge Lulu fan, though, don’t get me wrong.
Nick
May 5th, 2008 at 8:12 amLuigi -> Many of the people I went to school with, who learned from books and teachers, had the same learning flaws. I don’t think the problem is the internet itself, but rather just that not everyone is destined to be a good programmer who really understands the concept, but understands just well enough to get something working sort of.
If you’ve ever seen the Holmes on Homes show, you’ll see that sort of problem isn’t just limited to the programming industry.
May 5th, 2008 at 10:17 ami’m in turkey
highway = customs duty + other tax + entreport bla bla bla…
airway = no customs duty + no other tax
May 6th, 2008 at 7:00 amAhmet -> I think you have your own government to blame rather than Lulu in this case. You might want to communicate that information to Lulu customer support, they might be aware of how much a difference the method shipping makes in Turkey.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:30 amGreat and excellent article it’s realy helpful. Thanks again.
May 18th, 2008 at 8:43 amJust seen this presentation … Maybe a good starting point for CodeGear/Ebarcadero for publishing cheap paperback manuals, on demand !
Espresso Book Machine: Print a single paperback in minutes
May 25th, 2008 at 11:56 pmhttp://www.ondemandbooks.com/video.htm
I think tutorials should be done by video as that is the future now, and in most cases video tutorials are perfered more than tutorial books, but as for a manual a book should be used to make reference from. You will see that I am right about this theory with in the next 2 years, Tutorial books will finally die and video tutorials will take over. But like I said manuals should be books as its easyer to gain refference from than looking for a video.
June 27th, 2008 at 4:14 amI’m happy to see the team grow. If you guys ever open up a Whistler office let me know, I’m so in
June 23rd, 2009 at 12:51 pm