Why are computer books so expensive?

Today I took my usual weekend stroll through London, or rather, through the diminishing bookshop quarter of it around Charing Cross Road area since the local landlords (allegedly) priced the other companies out of the market in order to make more money off wine bars, etc. The two companies I am normally willing to buy books from are Foyles and Blackwell’s, and the first in particular has a department for computer books where the staff seem to know a little bit about what they are selling. Like, last week when they had their Wrox networking event, the guys mentioned a whole load of people who were coming, among them being the computer language expert Ivor Horton. And I said, like, anyone else coming? And they said basically that it was good enough that Horton was coming. But one thing I’ve noticed over the recent past is how expensive some computer books are, especially compared with what’s in them. The biggest books are usually the best value for money (the following are all from O’Reilly): Niemeyer & Knudsen’s Learning Java cost £31.95 with about 807 pages including the index; Greg Leahy’s The Complete FreeBSD (about 677 pages), and Welsh, Dalheimer, Dawson and Kaufman’s Running Linux (about 645 pages) all cost this amount. David Pogue’s Mac OS X – The Missing Manual, with 763 pages, cost only £20.95 (and that was before Blackwell’s £2 discount). Meanwhile, Essential Blogging, by Cory Doctorow and five others including Blosxom author Rael Dornfest, costs £20.99 from Blackwell’s Online, with only 260 pages; Ben Hammersley’s book on RSS aggregation for news and blogs costs the same, with only 222 pages. So do the maths: two-thirds of the price for a third, or in some cases a quarter, of the content. The other day I went to get an O’Reilly book on CVS, a program for maintaining program code, and discovered that it cost £28.50, with all of 360 pages. For the first time, I ended up ordering a book off Amazon, because they knocked off nearly a third off that price.

I brought up this issue once with one of the (then) Foyles computer department staff, and he said the reason was that there was a lot of program code in these books which had to be double-checked (or more). That may be true of programming books, but it doesn’t explain the huge discrepancy of cost for the smaller titles. Perhaps they are subsidising the price of the heavier tomes through the prices of the smaller ones?