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Comment by towelguy | Hacker News Reader

  > I briefly considered self publication via Kindle Direct
  > Publishing, because I thought it would be an interesting
  > experiment to publish EMC++ for $9.99 and see what
  > happened. [...] I fantasized that it would also have
  > shaken up the market for programming books and paved the
  > way to a world where $10 was the new normal for
  > high-quality technical books in digital form.

Guess we'll never know now.

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While I enjoy reading on my Kindle, I find that Kindle is not the best format for technical books with code samples, charts and tables. If you go electronic, it's much better to just produce a PDF. FWIW I have the PDF-only version of this book (a digital purchase from O'Reilly) and it's great

It depends on the book. I just bought Peter Norvigs Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence and although it is available for Kindle I chose the print version. The book is a monster! Too big to fit in my bag so I can't take it on my commute. Wish I'd bought the Kindle version now..

It's an incredible book, though. Well worth the effort. I didn't try it on a Kindle, but I suspect any non-trivial code listing (and this book has many) will look back because it will have to be downscaled.

Not sure. I mean, probably it is a good book for beginners, but when you have many years of experience, worked in various domains (AI, compilers, logic programming, etc..) - then this book just touches the surfaces of various these topics.

I went with the Kindle version, as e-ink is quite easier on the eyes.

PDFs would be great, but so far I haven't seen a book reader on this part of the world that offers a proper experience.

Yes, I use Kindle DX for tech books. Sometimes I wish for a slightly larger screen tough.

Compared to the time investment in reading a book, $50 is already incredibly cheap.

Yeah. I'm willing to spend $50 and more on the right book: the one that covers what I want to learn, walks me through the finer points with good pedagogy, and points me to other places I can learn more when something is outside scope.

And I know the kind of effort involved in creating such a thing is possibly not adequately rewarded at $50 retail -- $10 per retail sale might well be a disaster that leads to a glut of even crummier books.

The problem is that until I invest the time to read it, I don't really know whether it's a $50+ book that delivered what I'm asking for or a $5 book I could have gleaned from basic docs and blog entries but priced as a $50 book.

$10 retail on Kindle would give Scott $7 for each sale.

$50 retail in print gives him less than half that. Typical royalties are 10-12% of publisher net, which is around 50% of the cover price.

Some titles offer 10-12% of the cover price, but that's not very usual.

Bob Nystrom wrote a blog post[0] about self-publishing his book, Game Programming Patterns[1]. He used Kindle Direct Publishing and compares it against sales from CreateSpace, Smashwords and iBooks.

[0] http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2014/11/20/how-my-book-lau...

[1] http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com

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