From: Harry Ohlsen Date: 2003-02-01T08:46:53+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby Books -- A Question > "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 :-).