Thanks! I think most of the weight comes from the PNG diagrams, but I don’t actually know: I’ll put it on my to-do list to investigate, maybe there are some easy wins here.
Love the price transparency, the obvious followup question is where the other ~85% of the pie goes when I buy a ~50€ paper book, if the author only earns a little under 15%?
I imagine printing will be about 2 to 5€, if it's not ultra cheap print on demand refuse. Is the rest all for publishers and Amazon dot com?
Amazon takes the lion’s share, and then the rest of the pie looks very different depending on which route you go. Big publishers print in batches and have very low print/distribution costs. I ended up on the other end of the spectrum, self-publishing with Lulu (print-on-demand, so much higher costs). I wrote an article in French on exploring the economics of textbooks, from the open-source point of view, a few years back: https://framablog.org/2022/01/20/mais-ou-sont-les-livres-uni...
Thanks, I enjoyed the article. I've bought a couple creative commons books (PDF and printed), both to have the physical artifact and to send gratitude to the author, in a form that unambiguously means something. I rarely see a pay-what-you-want option, but that would make sense to me. Buying a free PDF isn't really like buying an apple or a manufactured good, it feels more like buying music on Bandcamp. It costs nothing to copy a file, but I still want to send what I can.
Sadly I haven't been very satisfied with print on demand books. It can be serviceable for textbooks, it does make prints a lot more accessible, but the quality has been pretty disappointing for me. When I buy a POD I often end up reading the PDF instead, which seems a bit wasteful.
When selling a product through a reseller, the markup is around 80-100%. I was horrified by this in the 80s, but soon learned that the resellers would be out of business otherwise.
The reason resellers exist is they do the marketing, warehousing, shipping, customer service, etc.
A scan of contents list suggests that it is mostly about heat engines. No mention of chemistry. Chemical reactions are mentioned in passing in the text but with no detail. Also no obvious signs of much interest in conduction, convection, or radiation.
So it's fairly narrow focus, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.
Indeed! Truth be told, I think the book really is missing a chapter on refrigeration systems. I had to call it done at some point for my own sanity. Maybe someone will jump in and add one someday!
Calculus hasn't changed a whole lot. There are probably better books for learning than I used in the 1970s, but I have to believe that you can find pretty decent older calculus texts for not a lot.
I imagine printing will be about 2 to 5€, if it's not ultra cheap print on demand refuse. Is the rest all for publishers and Amazon dot com?
Sadly I haven't been very satisfied with print on demand books. It can be serviceable for textbooks, it does make prints a lot more accessible, but the quality has been pretty disappointing for me. When I buy a POD I often end up reading the PDF instead, which seems a bit wasteful.
The reason resellers exist is they do the marketing, warehousing, shipping, customer service, etc.
So it's fairly narrow focus, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.